


È la vita / That’s Life

by mosolytobb



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Angst, Fix-It of Sorts, Love, M/M, Post-Book(s), Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-03-03 07:06:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 47,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13335999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosolytobb/pseuds/mosolytobb
Summary: [COMPLETED - 01/05/18]It’s 2007 and Oliver’s short visit to B. is over. Elio doesn’t expect to hear from him again - at least not for another few years, where their lives might once more cross paths, though barely touch.But a week later, an email arrives in Elio’s inbox that gives a glimmer of hope that something has been stirred inside of Oliver. Their correspondence continues briefly, and eventually leads the old lovers back to Rome.It is here that the pair learn of all that they have missed; the struggles and the heartache of a life apart.Can they reconcile a relationship so battered by the effects of time and distance and longing? Or will Rome end how Rome always ends? With a "later!" that really means "goodbye."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set directly after Oliver’s final visit to Italy, and envisions what might have happened following the end of the book.
> 
> I have kept to the timeline and nuances of the novel, rather than the movie (i.e being set in 1987 rather than 1983), but I have taken some creative license from the movie too as I think both add to the rich tapestries of how we imagine their story.
> 
> I don’t even graze the skill of Andre Aciman’s writing, and don’t claim to be able to mimic the wonderful storytelling he gives us in the book. I try to capture the feel of Elio’s narration in my writing, but don’t claim to be continuing this story at the same level of penmanship at all. I am simply telling you the story I have in my head the best way I can with the skills I have to hand.
> 
> I hope you enjoy! If you like it, please comment and let me know!
> 
> P.S If any Italian speakers notice any discrepancies with my poorly translated Italian, please speak up!

It was a little over a week after Oliver left that I received his email. I knew that he would be back in the States by then, as his stay in Menton was only for two nights, moving onto Nice for a brief engagement at the university before flying home.

I had not been expecting his correspondence. After all, the mere 24 hours he had spent here with us was the longest I had been in his presence for 20 years. We were nothing more than strangers now; just two people who shared one brief, albeit cosmic, blip of time in the vast landscape of our lives, and who had very little in common anymore. Not in way of interests, or in life experience, or even in love.

During our summer cataclysm, parts of us had merged, and as our own individual kinetic energy propelled us to different sides of the universe, our bodies held on, knowingly or unknowingly, to a little speck of each other that had become part of us whether we wanted it or not. But now, separated since by decades and oceans, we did not know much in the way of each other's lives. All our knowledge was surface details; the kind of things you could glean from a short conversation (which, realistically, was all we had permitted). And, of course, the things we had learned of one another in our all-too-brief summer of 1987.

I didn’t care to admit how much of what Oliver knew about me back then may now be untrue, or at least, expired. I had changed drastically; not so much physically, but emotionally, as I am sure he had too. Two decades of life does that to a person, and I wondered if he were to learn about the Elio of 2007, through words or through touch, would he still be as enamoured with me as he once was? I doubted it very much. I was 37 now, with a lot of life’s drudgery already piled heavy on top of me, and little in the way of desirability.

Oliver had passed his email address onto my mother when he called in the spring to politely propose his summer visit, hoping that it would make the arrangements easier for her. My father had never had it, since right up until his death he would continue to send physical letters to anyone who would humour his devotion to traditional communication.

“Any loiter-sack can send an email, Elio,” he would say using one of the absurd old-english insults he would appropriate whenever he wished to curse but didn't want to compromise his integrity. “But letters, oh letters, mio caro ragazzo, they require _love_!” I admired my father's passion always, but as technology evolved, I found his reluctance to yield quite infuriating.

Oliver, of course, was one of those who humoured him with earnestness, and would no doubt have continued indefinitely if time had allowed us all more days with him than we received.

My mother wanted to email Oliver herself, giddy with excitement at the prospect of seeing _il cauboi_ again. But as was the case these days, her enthusiasm was optimistic and misplaced, and whenever I mentioned his impending arrival she would swoon like it was the first time she had heard his name in decades. I wondered then if Oliver knew what to expect of my mother’s developing illness. If he knew what to expect of my new life back here in B. as not just her son, but her caregiver too. Did he know just how hollow everything had become, here in _paradise_?

Of course, I had no choice but to be the one to write to him. Our emails were short; business-like and brusque. His train was to arrive at 6:15, no he wouldn’t need to be collected from the station, yes the old room was fine.

I had not expected another email from him after he left that afternoon for Menton, at least not so soon, and definitely not so effusive. I was sat in my father’s old study when it came through, which, by dereliction had become mine, though still weighed heavy with his everlasting memory in every piece of furniture and every book that still rested there as if waiting for him to return.

I couldn’t spend too long in there. Usually I opted to work elsewhere in the house or the garden, thankful for the invention of laptops and wifi that offered me such freedoms. The room had become an accidental shrine to his legacy, and I had spent many of my darkest days grieving for him in there, face pressed against the worn velvet of the couch that had borne witness to so many of our most tender moments as father and son. If his ghost spot was where I went to be _with_ him, this was where I went to be _without_ him. It was, in many ways, a form of self-harm.

The email I received from Oliver - merely a friendly thank you note to the untrained eye - ignited a fire within me that had lay dormant for years. The familiar burn unnerved and excited me in equal measures. 

 

 

> **Received:** Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:16:44 [UTC+1]
> 
> **From:** Oliver H.
> 
> **To:** Elio P.
> 
> **Subject:** _Gratitude_
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Elio,
> 
>  
> 
> I hope this email finds you and the family well.
> 
> Thank you so much for last week, my time with you all was quite the trip down memory lane. I am not sure I have ever known (or ever will again) a place quite so dazzling.
> 
> The stark absence of your father was lamentable, of course, but you truly shine in his place.
> 
> Please pass on my warmest thanks to Annella and Mafalda for their ever-enchanting hospitality. I have promised to call your mother before the summer is out, to see how she is doing. I hope this is okay? I’m sorry to hear of her illness. I hope the difficulties for her ease, or at least become manageable. My heart is with you all more than you know.
> 
> My youngest son, who shows little to no interest in the things I do, found my copy of Stendahl’s Armance and was interested in your inscription. I told him what I could bear to, and I am now working my way back through it. It was a curious gift, don’t you think?
> 
> I miss you, Elio. Perhaps it is time that you and I broke that silence you spoke of?
> 
> Just a thought.
> 
>  
> 
> With love,
> 
> Oliver.

 

I read his words through fluttering, heavy-lidded eyes, thrice over before considering my response. They were just words. 207 words which individually, or even collectively, amounted to nothing much at all. A greeting, a thank you, some condolences, a question or two, a non-confrontational plea for conversation. It was entirely ordinary.

And yet, to me, it felt entirely _extraordinary_. The words were not the usual tone of Oliver’s recent emails to me. They echoed far more closely the letters we exchanged in those first few weeks before Oliver’s life without me swallowed him up and I was no longer something he could entertain.

Perhaps there was a scent attached to it that was designed only to enchant me, and me alone. Like some kind of wizarding spell that made it so an average person would read the email as something average, but the intended recipient would be gifted the breadth of emotion hidden between the keystrokes. It was the only explanation I could summon for my overblown reaction.

As I read his words, it felt as though the air around me had stilled completely; the curtains stopped swaying in the breeze from the courtyard, and I could suddenly smell every page of every ancient book surrounding me instead of the delights of lunch which seconds earlier had been drifting pleasantly into the room. The acoustics disappeared too, reducing to the sound of the modem next to the computer whirring with feverish energy as it transmitted the binary messages I could see on the screen. There were no chirping birds, no distant sound of waves crashing against the rocks, no laughter from the orchard where the neighbours grandchildren had been loudly playing _‘Lupo delle ore’_ under the roasting midday sun.

In this sudden microcosm of my own thought, I had the overwhelming feeling that I was on a precipice of change. I was so affected by it, that my first instinct was to ignore it. Send a quick ‘you’re welcome’ in some kind of fashion that didn’t seem too rude and be done with it. After all, that’s all this was, right? An elaborate, overly-sentimental thank you note from someone who was feeling some kind of way about some kind of guilt. It did not need an equally elaborate response from me. No doubt it would be met with a casual and curt response anyway, to indicate that I had misread his entire meaning and he didn’t actually want to continue correspondence past offering his gratitude to the women of my home. Maybe his email back to me would consist of just one word: _Later._ I did not want to receive such an email.

But his reference to my inscription, and his gentle plea for the liberation of our so-called silence, told me otherwise. This did not need decoding - this was a plain request that even I couldn’t get wrong. When I had written in the front of that book many years ago, I had wanted this exact scenario to happen. My intention was for it to be found years later, when I was all but a short story in the anthology of his life. Perhaps I wouldn’t be the longest, or the most interesting, or even the best written. But I would hope to be the most mysterious, the most alluring, the most poignant. I wanted it’s rediscovery to stir him, and clearly it had.

I wondered what he had said to his son in that moment. Did he downplay it? Downplay me? Downplay _us_? I couldn’t imagine that he told anything close to the truth.

I knew that my reply would be integral in determining what would happen from here, if anything at all. Part of me did not want to know all of the places it might, could, should, wouldn’t, couldn’t go. But as always, curiosity was getting the better of me, and as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes once said: “Curiosity is the lust of the mind.” That couldn’t be more true for me.

I took my time, considered each implication of each word as if expecting him to study every possible meaning of everything I did or didn't say, and sent my response up to the satellites to be beamed back down to him halfway across the world.

 

 

> **Received:** Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:48:13 [UTC+1]
> 
> **From:** Elio P.
> 
> **To:** Oliver H.
> 
> **Subject:** RE: _Gratitude_
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Oliver,
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks for your email. Myself and the family are well, and I will be sure to pass on your gratitude. I know everyone thoroughly enjoyed your flying visit. You are welcome any time.
> 
> I’m not sure I am a worthy stand-in for my father, but I am conjuring my best impression. Though it feels very fraudulent and insincere, his shoes are not easy ones to fill.
> 
> Please do call, when you can. Her health is declining day by day, and I can’t promise that she will be expecting it, but she will undoubtedly relish in a call from "il cauboi". Little things like that help keep her above the swell of the disease. We are living for the good days, and merely enduring the bad.
> 
> It is _curious_ that you consider it curious. I think it was a very fitting gift, all things considered. Are you enjoying the re-read?
> 
> There is no silence from me. You of all people should know I am an open book. Is there something you wish to know?
> 
>  
> 
> \- Elio

 

His second email came late in the evening, though I guess it wasn’t so late for him across the ocean.

I had already retired to my bedroom after a long afternoon with my mother at the doctors clinic in N. She had returned home from our trip terribly distressed after the regular doctor was not there to conduct her checkup. This was not a surprise reaction, but pulling up at the villa and immersing her back into the world she adored usually helped calm her down.

It didn’t this time though, and not even Mafalda’s loving companionship or the promise of lemon semifreddo for dessert could console her. She refused her dinner entirely, and didn’t calm at all until Marzia came to visit, who I had called in hopelessness.

After she eventually fell asleep, Marzia and I enjoyed a bowl of the semifreddo together on the patio with the blanket sound of the cicadas enveloping us. I was always thankful for her presence when things got difficult or lonely, and she had never yet let me down in the moments when I needed her the most.

She left at around 10pm, and since there was nobody else for me to speak to, I went upstairs and tried to wind down. Though my ability to do that, even after showering, reading and listening to some music, was completely tenuous. My bedtime routine was seemingly being disturbed by constant and penetrating thoughts, not of my mother’s struggles and the sadness that brought me - though that was on my mind of course - or of the looming deadline for the piece I was writing about Rosalia de Castro for the Oxford Quarterly - but of _Oliver_.

I decided to try and work on my laptop, my legs tucked under the sheets that Mafalda no longer folded for me out of a love for her work, but out of a love for me. Still, I could not concentrate, and my mind wandered repeatedly to him, imagining his eyes reading the words of my email somewhere in New England. Perhaps at his desk, or in his office, or at the kitchen table surrounded by his adolescent children.

I realised that I had been periodically checking for a response ever since I had retreated upstairs, unknowingly rekindling the long-lost desire for him not to ignore me. Apparently I still wasn’t over that.

 

 

> **Received:** Fri, 27 Jul 2007 23:31:03 [UTC+1]
> 
> **From:** Oliver H.
> 
> **To:** Elio P.
> 
> **Subject:** RE: _Gratitude_
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Elio,
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks for replying. I was not so sure you would.
> 
> Please do keep me informed on Annella’s progress. Your tenderness is one of your most wonderful traits. I hope her good days are frequent, for your sake.
> 
> The re-read is very enjoyable. Tragic and beautiful, and terrifyingly relatable. I did not see how curious it was until I viewed it through hindsight. Apparently you had the gift of _foresight_? Did you know this? Perhaps that is why you have always seemed just a stride or two ahead of me.
> 
> There's nothing specific. I just wish to know more about you than what I can find on Google. Two conversations over 20 years doesn't feel sufficient, don’t you agree?
> 
> Anyway, I will be returning to Rome in November for some guest lectures at La Sapienza. It is a way off yet, but if you care to, perhaps we could meet?
> 
>  
> 
> With love,
> 
> Oliver.

 

His email irked me. I wasn’t sure what his implication was regarding my gift, or the implication that I wouldn’t pen a reply, and since I prided myself generally on being unflappable, I had forgotten how he could all too easily reduce me to frustration. I had so much I could say, so much I _wanted_ to say, but so much I knew I wouldn’t.

The invite to Rome startled me, but I could see his intention as clear as glass. Rome was not exactly an easy commute from B. It’s a day’s journey by car, near enough, and he knows it. He travelled it just last week when he stopped by on his way to France. It was not somewhere you would request a casual meeting with someone without any larger plans in place. Especially not someone who lived 500km away.

But I knew what he was doing. He was seeking my company on neutral ground. Not in our ghost spots with my mother nearby and memories circling us like a hypnotic wave; and not in his home town with his family a short drive away and my painful sting of loss paralysing me. I understood. I really did.

But the problem was that Rome was _not_ neutral ground for me. That one spot, where he pushed me up against the wall and gave me the kiss that forever changed my life, has bled it’s sentimentality into every street and every avenue of the city. I cannot visit there without his memory penetrating me and dragging me like a lamb to slaughter back to that very place, where I would walk the cobbles timidly and feel the swell of my heart rupture and spill from my tear ducts. When I lived there for a short while many years ago, his ghostly presence haunted me more than I could cope with.

You say my tenderness is one of my greatest qualities, Oliver, but I would say it is what makes me one of the weakest men alive.

I read over the email once more, and decided to reply in the morning. I had hoped that when I woke my mawkishness would have been brought to a simmer, and I could make sense of what I was feeling with some tact. It hadn’t, though. So after breakfast I replied anyway, knowing that my confusion would, in true Elio Perlman style, come out in the form of an asperity I couldn’t curb.

 

 

> **Received:** Sat, 28 Jul 2007 08:03:55 [UTC+1]
> 
> **From:** Elio P.
> 
> **To:** Oliver H.
> 
> **Subject:** RE: _Gratitude_
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Oliver,
> 
>  
> 
> Why would I not reply? Do you think me so callous?
> 
> I don't think I had the gift of foresight, I think you are reading much too into that. The book just felt fitting at the time, and you seem to be imprinting some kind of guilt upon it. Don't.
> 
> If circumstance allows, I would be pleased to meet with you in November.
> 
>  
> 
> \- Elio

 

 

> **Received:** Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:20:11
> 
> **From:** Oliver H.
> 
> **To:** Elio P.
> 
> **Subject:** RE: _Gratitude_
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Elio,
> 
>  
> 
> If my last message came off as brash or rude, I apologise. Callous is never a word I would associate with you.
> 
> You are probably right about the over-thinking. I tend to do that more so these days. It’s not difficult to sensationalise things when you’re in the throws of nostalgia.
> 
> I'll keep you updated on the dates of my trip, and hope that circumstance plays in my favour. I think I owe you a drink.
> 
>  
> 
> Stay in touch,
> 
> Oliver.

 

I did stay in touch, but only in a very rudimentary way. August and September were difficult months for my mother, and in turn, for all of us. She grew more fearful and confused than ever, and eventually became disorientated even in the villa she had known since infancy. Growing up we did not live here all-year-round, but ever since my father died this had become our permanent residence. It’s where my mother felt most safe, and I must say that I felt that way too.

Sometimes - during what initially seemed to be good days, but very quickly turned into not-so-good days - her eyes would flash with a joy I hadn’t seen for a long time. She would sit upright in her seat, stretch out her palm towards whatever doorway was closest, and call out my father’s name with such certainty that he was nearby I would almost fall for it myself.

I wondered what kind of cruel trick our God was playing on us, to tease her with such heart-wrenching confusion. We had to relive her grief many times, so often so that my own wounds seemed to never completely heal over.

I eventually wrote to Oliver again mid-October, but this time with some substance. Partly due to me actually having news to tell, partly because my own mood had lifted somewhat, but also because of the short exchange I had with him on the phone (when he called to speak to my mother again) that had grazed the scab of my longing to interact with him.

Though I did not yet know it, my email - admittedly intended to rouse emotion in him but with no real ulterior motive or expectation - kick-started a fairly modest conversation that would lead me to _another_ life-altering trip to Rome.

 

 

> **Received:** Mon, 11 Oct 2007 18:31:40 [UTC+1]
> 
> **From:** Elio P.
> 
> **To:** Oliver H.
> 
> **Subject:** _Buona sera amico_
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Oliver,
> 
>  
> 
> Though she can’t remember to express it herself, your Annella sends her love and thanks you for the phone call this weekend.
> 
> You sounded well. Is all well?
> 
> I have at last made the decision to hire a live-in nurse to care for my mother. I would look after her myself forever if I could, but the physical and emotional practicalities have become pretty burdensome. Mafalda, who hasn’t been employed by us for many years, still takes on a lot of work that I wish to free her from. She is old now, and deserves to rest in Anchise’s orchard for as long as time allows. She still insists on making apricot juice for everyone though.
> 
> The nurse is a nice girl from Milan called Gianna, fresh out of school and thoroughly enjoying exploring our little slice of the riviera. It has brought some life back to the villa. We even re-erected the old volleyball net so that she could play with the friends she has made from her evenings in town.
> 
> It is interesting, because she seems to have become quite enamored with me. Now _that_ is curious, don’t you think?
> 
> Is your trip to Rome next month still happening? If so, I think I could spare a few days in the city.
> 
> Let me know.
> 
>  
> 
> \- Elio

 

 

> **Received:** Tue, 12 Oct 2007 13:38:20 [UTC+1]
> 
> **From:** Oliver H.
> 
> **To:** Elio P.
> 
> **Subject:** _RE:_ _Buona sera amico_
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Elio,
> 
>  
> 
> I was surprised (but delighted) to hear from you.
> 
> All is very well, thank you. I have recently moved house and discovered that I own more useless things than I care to admit.
> 
> I think you have made a wise choice. You deserve to spend these days with her as her son, not her nurse. There’s no shame or failing in that. It sounds like it’s working out great for everyone. What I wouldn’t give for a glass of that juice right about now!
> 
> That is very curious indeed, though I can’t say I blame her. I hope you are being gentle with her feelings. Do you reciprocate them?
> 
> The trip is happening, yes. I was going to write to you soon to let you know. I’ll be there from November 12th for a week. Can you make it? I hope you can.
> 
>  
> 
> With love,
> 
> Oliver.

 

 

 

> **Received:** Tue, 12 Oct 2007 13:52:16 [UTC+1]
> 
> **From:** Elio P.
> 
> **To:** Oliver H.
> 
> **Subject:** _RE:_ _Buona sera amico_
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Oliver,
> 
>  
> 
> I think Democritus and Epictetus _both_ have some pretty famous quotes about the lack of happiness possessions bring us. Perhaps you should study their work a bit more thoroughly?
> 
> Of course I don’t reciprocate. She is 25 and I am an old man 12 years her senior. Even _I_ draw the line at that. Besides, as lovely as she is, I can’t say she is my type.
> 
> November 12th is fine with me. Shall we make plans closer to the time?
> 
>  
> 
> \- Elio

  

 

> **Received:**  Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:09:55 [UTC+1]
> 
> **From:** Oliver H.
> 
> **To:** Elio P.
> 
> **Subject:** _RE:_ _Buona sera amico_
> 
>  
> 
> Ha! You mock me so charmingly, Elio.
> 
> It shocks me to hear you besmirch the joy an older man can bring. Will I recognise you at all in Rome?
> 
> Yes, we can concrete the details in a few weeks. I’ll look forward to it. Give my love to everyone in paradise.
> 
>  
> 
> See you very soon,
> 
> Oliver.
> 
>  
> 
> P.S you are far from old.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

By the time November rolled around, the air in B. was bitter with the threat of winter. I had never liked this time of year when I was a younger. Being forced back into routine always felt like a compress on my carefree soul, and whatever summer memories I was holding dear were quickly being rained out and replaced with the drudgery of school. I loved to learn, of course, but I loved my freedoms far more.

That feeling didn’t really go away in my young adulthood either. I continued to summer here most years during my breaks from college, and when I was thrust back into the world of studying and fending for myself in the unbroken smog of the city, I always yearned for those long, languid days by the river that never seemed to end but always inevitably did.

That’s what autumn always felt like to me - an ending of many sorts. Most people probably felt that way in December, when the year closes out and we’re pressured into finding the inclination to leave things behind and instead embrace the change in front of us. But autumn; the season where the leaves fall, the rivers swell, and the sky is bleached of her beauty - that’s the _real_ ending. The year slips away into it’s closing act, and we’re forced inside to watch from behind a screen, until the first snow comes and announces the arrival of winter.

In those years that followed Oliver’s departure, autumn took on a whole new feeling of loss. It reminded me terribly of him. The changing of the leaves each year would sting me with the memory of how much I was dreading the first visual cue that Oliver was to be gone soon. The green ash trees along the incline into B. were always the first to show, yellowed tips appearing as early as the last days of August, and I unfairly resented them for doing what was only natural.

I remember one of our final days before Rome, riding our bikes for the sheer joy of it, trying desperately to hold onto each precious moment we had left together before the skies scooped Oliver up and stole him from me. He pointed up at the trees as we cycled past, each one kissed on top with a growing crown of yellow leaves, and said through labored breaths: “Look, Elio. Fall is on it’s way!”

He had a joyful wonder about it that I didn’t share. Instead, I wanted to climb each tree, rip every single yellow leaf off every single branch, and throw them into the insultingly autumnal breeze that had been following us up the incline. They offended me. They were _mocking_ me. They wanted Oliver gone, and I knew it.

“No it’s not, Oliver,” I would say like a petulant child, throwing the leaves one-by-one into the wind that carried them far away from us. “Not yet it isn’t.”

If only it could be that simple to delay the inevitable passing of time, perhaps I wouldn’t have let myself get so wrapped up in the regret we hold when we feel like we wasted so much of it.

Of course, as is the true nature of time, the feelings of contempt towards autumn disappeared with it. I did not mourn Oliver indefinitely. It reduced year-on-year until eventually he barely crossed my mind - not even when the ash trees were entirely yellow and totally smug about it. Other grief outlived it, different seasons became difficult for different reasons, new sorrows came and went, and many were much heavier burdens to bear. My perspective was widened as I grew and aged, and Oliver’s impact on me - though still deeply visceral - became entirely forceless. Autumn became just another season, albeit an often dreary one.

 

*******

 

I decided to take the train on November 12th, opting against driving so that my car could be left at home for Manfredi or Mafalda to use should they need it in my absence. I couldn’t exactly expect them to drive my father’s old Fiat, since it had become somewhat of a death trap. It could get you into town easy enough, or perhaps down to the beach, but you’d no doubt be walking home. I didn’t have the heart to get rid of it though.

As I boarded the train at Genoa station, a small suitcase and a backpack hooked over my shoulder, I was hit with a wave of sweet-smelling nostalgia. I had spent the years of my adolescence hopping on and off these trains, going to and from the cities of northern Italy with friends, chasing parties and girls and everything else we thought we wanted when we were young and the summer was limitless. Long before my father would let me drive his car, this was how we got around. The buses were much too crowded, full of _gli anziani_ who turned their noses up at our loud, budding frenzy for life. I remembered it all with great fondness, thinking back to the pure wonder I no doubt had about what my future had in store for me. Would I be happy with who I was now? Would I _recognize_ who I was now? If I sat down next to a teenage Elio and started a conversation, would he like me?

I checked into my hotel at around 4pm, a quaint but nice enough boutique place that I hadn’t put too much thought into when I booked online. Oliver and I had agreed to meet for dinner at 7pm, and I spent the hours leading up to it in front of my laptop, cross-legged on the creaky bed that was likely older than I was. This was partly because I had a lot to do if I was to get my first draft over to the editor at Oxford in time, but mostly because I needed the distraction from the voice in my head constantly questioning the meaning of my trip.

What _was_ the meaning of my trip? My stomach was balled up in knots as I tried to reconcile with the inconclusive reasons I was there. Was I there for Oliver alone, and if so, was it now on _my_ shoulders to ensure our meeting held a purpose? After all, _he_ was there for work, I was just tagging along.

The restaurant Oliver had suggested was a small place, the exterior painted blue with glistening lights surrounding the windows. It had that authentic romantic feel; a quintessential Italian treasure that felt as much a part of the landscape of Rome as it’s churches and museums did. The hand-painted sign outside declared itself _the best pasta in Rome_ , and I had to laugh. Whoever had given such a review had clearly never had the pleasure of tasting Mafalda’s tortellini. They were probably American, I thought to myself.

There was no sign of Oliver yet, so I leaned up against the painted limestone and lit up my first cigarette of the evening. I watched with fascination as a young couple staggered past me, blind-drunk on each other's existence, hands and lips everywhere as they giggled and moved with little grace along the cobbles before me. It made me smile around my cigarette, wondering if Oliver and I had looked anything like that the last time we were here together. Not in public, surely, but perhaps in those darkened alleys as we staggered back to our hotel at 3am. I distinctly remembered being so desperate for his body against mine one evening that I had practically forced him to carry me against his chest like an infant monkey as I kissed his neck with greed. In hindsight, it was a little ridiculous, but at the time it felt like the most natural thing in the world to climb his body and insist to be held.

“Elio!”

That familiar bellowing voice came from my left. My name sounded gluttonous in his mouth; thick and sweet and entirely all-American. I immediately longed to hear him say it again. And again. _And again_.

When I turned, he was stood only a few paces away from me, looking impossibly handsome and overwhelmingly spectral. For some reason, seeing him here in Rome felt so different than seeing him in New England, or even in B. a few months earlier. It was as if both of those encounters were not entirely real, as if I had only seen a projection of him then, and now I was setting my eyes upon the real thing for the first time since that miserable Christmas I learned of his marriage.

He was wearing a blue shirt, buttoned neatly up to his throat, with a gray jacket thrown over the top. He looked much smarter than I did, as always, and time had been nothing but kind on his looks. Somehow, with the addition of neatly groomed stubble, his face seemed to reflect youth more readily than mine did, despite our difference in age. I had experimented with facial hair in my time, usually as an attempt to look older, but I quickly realized that wasn’t always something worthy of seeking.

“Oliver,” I smiled, nodding my head in his direction. I kept my greeting as elementary as his. I wanted to seem calm, composed, un-bothered by his sudden overwhelming presence, despite the frenzy that was bubbling up inside of me. I’m not all too sure if it worked.

When he approached, he leaned in to kiss my cheek in that casual European way we were both accustomed to, his right hand ever so slightly resting against my waist as he did so. His brief touch rendered me uncharacteristically speechless. I felt naked infront of him already, entirely stripped of all of the poise I had hoped to retain, only a loose smile covering my modesty.

“Let’s go inside,” he said, rubbing his hands together and glancing up at the darkening sky. If he was apprehensive like I was, he didn’t show it. I tossed the rest of my cigarette away carelessly, watching it roll with a dying spark into the street.

As we waited for our table to be prepared, I stayed silent, feeling unnervingly timid in Oliver’s looming statuesque presence. Was he always so tall? So broad? So far-reaching?

“You look great,” he complimented me suddenly.

I looked at him dubiously, unsure and unable to find my voice still. He nodded to confirm that he meant his statement and it wasn’t an accidental slip of the tongue, meant for someone else, or some _time_ else. His smile was wide and convincing.

I smiled back this time, adjusting the hem of my sweater with the awkward insecurity of the teenage boy I apparently still was in his company. I hated myself right about then, and could have easily ran straight out of the door and all the way back to B. without stopping, and been happy with my decision.

“How was your journey?” Oliver asked once we were seated and the waiter had poured the wine.

“Quite enjoyable,” I told him, sipping at the deep plum liquid. Oliver had selected it, so of course it was very palatable. “I got some reading done, stared out of the window for a while, listened in on a couple arguing all the way from Livorno to Grosseto. If she has any sense she’ll leave him before the end of the year,” I smirked, rolling the stem of my glass in between my fingers.

“Ah, free entertainment,” he mused. “That’s always the best thing about public transport.”

During our meal - which was, in fact, some of the best pasta even _I_ had eaten - we fell into an easy stride of conversation. Our differences quickly melted away as we discussed our careers at length, something that allowed us to connect without having to rely on reminiscing. We had already done that in the summer, albeit briefly, and it had stung us both.

He told me of his time at each institution, and I told him of mine. We delved into our achievements, our failings, our updated opinions on scholars and philosophers and even politicians. We titillated each others beliefs that didn’t entirely match our own in a comfortable banter that apparently hadn’t been lost in time. We swapped thoughts on books and essays, music and art, modern culture and ancient culture, and discussed, at length, my father’s substantial impact on both of our lives. It was like I was catching up with an old friend.

Correction: I _was_ catching up with an old friend.

I had all-too-easily forgotten just how many interests Oliver and I shared; just how much of our core was similar and rooted in a passion for the same things. It reminded me that our summer together was not merely lust to share each others bodies, but also a desire to share each other's minds. We had connected on an intellectual level long before we connected physically, and I had no doubt that this had deepened our affection for one another, and in turn, our afflictions once it was over.

 

*******

 

Once dinner came to an end, I planned to walk with him part way to his hotel before calling a taxi back to my own. I had intentionally arranged to meet an old professor early the next morning so that my trip held some purpose beyond just meeting Oliver. Though, I knew deep down that the main reason was so that I had an excuse to retreat to my hotel as early as I desired, should I feel the need to.

So far, I hadn’t felt that need. Oliver’s company was enjoyable and un-pressured, but I still felt the tug to retreat soon enough, if just to preserve the evening’s charm.

Unlike our northern patch of Italy, un-shielded from the windchill of the ocean, Rome was often still very mild this time of year. With a sweater, the air was comfortable enough to be outside, and I was thankful for that. We meandered comfortably along the sidewalk a stride or so apart.

“I should really call a taxi,” I said, slowing to a stop and glancing down the quiet street.

“So soon?” Oliver’s tone was tinged with disappointment. I didn’t answer, as if I knew to expect a rebuttal. “Would you not care for a drink at my hotel? It’s only a little further.”

I considered it for a moment, though it was a futile argument in my head. I was already on my way to being half-cut from the totting of the wine. The heavy food soaking it up in my stomach was probably my only saving grace, rendering me slightly buzzed rather than drunk. Yet, I knew I would say yes the second he had asked.

“Sure.”

We walked along the winding street until we reached his hotel; a towering building that was far more luxurious than mine was. We entered the vaulted lobby and made an instant beeline for the bar behind the concierge.

“ _Scusate signori_ ,” the young man near the doorway said to us, “ _Abbiamo chiuso alle undici oggi._ ” They closed at 11.

“Well damn,” Oliver huffed, before quickly dazzling me with one of his carefree smiles. “I have a bottle of cognac upstairs?” he suggested as a substitute, gesturing upwards with his thumb. I didn’t even bother trying to feign indifference, I just nodded and followed him to the elevators.

When we arrived at his room, which was more of a suite than anything, the luxuriousness informed me unquestionably of his wealth. I was not a stranger to money, of course. We were both from privileged backgrounds. Whilst I was no doubt successful in my own career, most of my material wealth was inherited, in the way of being passed on through generations - like the villa - or in the way of being afforded to me the education and lifestyle that allowed it. Oliver’s, however, was mostly self-made, and this lavish suite proved to me the level of success he had achieved in the decades I had been apart from him.

He had a quick call to make first. His youngest son, Alexander, had a football game that day and he had promised to check in on the result. It seemed that his children were entirely all-American boys, probably as burly and masculine as Oliver, only with less of the soft charm he had acquired during his time overseas in countries that value and encourage more sensitivity and vulnerability than life in the States did. He was likely a very different father to them than my father was to me.

I decided to give him some privacy and took the opportunity to step out onto the spacious balcony for another cigarette. These days, it was considered uncouth to smoke inside, even here in Rome where smoking was still a very valid pastime. I leaned against the iron railing that kept me from the street below, and when Oliver joined me a few minutes later, I offered him a cigarette from the packet. He took it gladly and leaned in close to light it from the tip of mine. I remembered him doing that many times before, and the act didn’t thrill my senses now any less than it did then.

“Did he win?” I was referring to the football game.

“Of course.”

“How are they both?” I asked, referring to his boys. I realized I hadn’t yet mentioned them, which seemed terribly rude.

“Angry, dissatisfied, indifferent,” he shrugged, “Everything you weren’t at their age.”

“Oh I was all those things,” I assured him quickly, shaking my head at the breeze.

I considered that he probably saw me at 17 through some very rose-tinted glasses. He knew me only in a vacuum; drenched in sun and smelling of peaches. I was not three-dimensional to him like his sons were, which was likely a good thing for everyone. I made great effort for Oliver to not see the childish, bratty, hormonal side of me that all teenagers have, though I’m sure he saw straight through many of my attempts at sugar-coating myself to impress him. Perhaps, unknowingly, I had only made myself sweeter for him. I liked the thought of that.

We fell into a comfortable silence, stood there looking out at the view of Via Veneto, and it reminded me all at once of the last time we were here together. How could it be that so many years had passed already? Time suddenly felt inexplicably fragile, and I dared not even breathe for fear that another 20 years would have disappeared before I finished my cigarette.

The sound of a nearby nightclub drifted down the street towards us; pulsing music, hollering friends, the laughter of youthful lovers spilling into the street. I smiled to myself, thinking of all _my_ youths. My youth in B., my youth in New York, my youth in Oxford. They were all alarmingly different from each other, but each was an important square in the patchwork that made me who I was. Those kids in the street below us probably had no idea just how significant these carefree days would become.

“Music these days is a mystery to me,” Oliver mused, unimpressed, through a sigh of nicotine.

I clicked my tongue in disagreement. “I like it.”

Oliver exhaled through his nose. It was a half-laugh. “Of course you do.”

“I’m younger than you,” I pointed out.

“Perhaps that’s it.” He turned to me, a smirk playing on his lips as a thought flashed across his face. “You always have been open to pretty much anything, though.”

I looked into his eyes and intercepted his playful meaning immediately, thinking back to the days when I was still wet behind the ears, so to speak, and desperate to discover all the ways our bodies could find pleasure with the other. Oliver taught me a lot in those weeks, and I sure was eager to learn.

Yes, I suppose I _was_ pretty open.

“Shut up,” I chided him with an elbow, my neck flushing a little. He laughed, and so did I.

“I suppose you'll be smoking electronic cigarettes next, huh?”

“Certainly not. Some things shouldn't be tampered with,” I said as I took a final drag and tossed the butt out into the street. He looked at me incredulously, gesturing to the ashtray beside him which I had ignored. “But music,” I continued, “Music is an art, and it’s always valuable, in whatever form, so long as somebody finds joy in it.”

“Always so very wise,” Oliver said slowly, a contemplative smile tugging on his lips. “It makes me wonder why you didn’t pursue it as a career. When your father told me you were studying literature I was surprised.”

“Surprised?” I did not know why that would be surprising. I turned around to mimic the way he was leaning back against the balcony railing. “I minored in music composition for my undergrad. That was enough. I didn’t want music to ever become a chore. You have to really kill off every other part of yourself to make a career out of it - It’s like sport or art, there’s no room for anything else, it has to consume you. I had plenty of other things I wanted to experience away from the piano bench.”

“You still play though, right?” Oliver’s question was ridiculous and he knew it.

“Nah, I figured why bother.” I wrinkled my nose in mock disinterest, before laughing and shaking my head. “Of course I do. Every single day.”

“Good. I never could take my eyes off you when you played. It was like I was hypnotized.”

His words were not inviting a response, but I felt the reaction in the pit of my stomach. My breath caught in the back of my throat as I thought back to images of Oliver, shirtless and exquisite in my father’s favorite green armchair, watching me play with an infatuation that would make the hair at the nape of my neck stand to attention. I made a point of looking at my feet in case I looked as dumbfounded as I felt.

Oliver stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray with a composure I envied. “Would you like some cognac?” he asked as he made a beeline for the doorway. I thought he was never going to ask.

“Yes please.”

 

*******

 

I took a seat at the small table set out there on the balcony. Oliver returned a moment later with the bottle and two glasses, filling them both up generously. He sat down opposite me and raised his glass. I clinked mine to his without a word, took in a mouthful with a satisfying sigh, and leaned back against my chair.

“Do you feel you know enough about me now? Has my silence broken sufficiently for you?” I was being sardonic, but playfully.

“Oh yes. I know everything I could possibly know about Elio Perlman the successful academic.”

“I’m sensing a _but_ …”

“I still know very little of _you_.”

“As I said in my email, I’m not sure there’s much you would care to know.”

He shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he didn’t mind, he just wanted to know _something_. “Tell me about your years in New York,” he suggested.

I was taken aback by his request to know about my undergraduate years. I wondered why he had chosen this period specifically; what could he possibly want to know? I felt uneasy about it for some reason, unsure of what he was truly asking me, and my apprehension must have been visible on my face because he immediately defended his request.

“Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to divulge on your sexual awakenings or anything.” He was joking, but I felt barbed.

“I didn’t think you were,” I said quickly, shooting him a sharp look across the table. “Besides,” my voice softened from it’s initial curtness, “ _You_ were my sexual awakening.”

“Hm,” he nodded in agreement, as if that fact filled him with a feeling he didn’t want to acknowledge. Regret, perhaps. Shame? I couldn’t tell.

He already knew plenty about the academics of my time at NYU - we had discussed it at length over dinner - but I really did not know what he wanted to hear about the rest. I could give him a whole anthology of anecdotes if he wanted me to, but I couldn’t say that he would enjoy them.

Perhaps I could tell him about the time myself and another guy got jumped on our way back from The Pyramid Club - one of Manhattan’s most prominent gay venues on Avenue A that was notorious for having sketchy characters nearby, ready and willing to punish you for your sins. I could tell him how I was hoping to get a quick blowjob in an alleyway, or maybe more, but instead ended up with two snapped ribs, a broken cheekbone and 28 stitches threaded into my face. Or, maybe, if he wanted me to, I could tell him all about the first of many funerals I attended where the deceased had been outlived by both parents _and_ grandparents despite being perfectly healthy and full of promise mere months earlier.

Is _that_ the kind of thing he wanted to hear? Are _they_ the kind of tales he wanted me to recite from my years in New York City?

I considered briefly - with a degree of irritation - that perhaps his question about my time there in the early 90’s was not actually a request for stories, but was instead an indirect way of trying to uncover the status of something he didn’t dare ask me.

“I was young,” I shrugged eventually, swirling the last of my cognac around in the glass idly. I figured I could humor him a little, at least. “They were the best years of my life, in many ways, and the worst in plenty of others. For most of the time I lived in a huge duplex apartment in Greenwich Village with 11 other people. It wasn’t as cramped as it sounds. The people I lived with were awesome, not all of them were students, some were artists or just doing their own thing. I could have afforded a better place if I wanted to, but I hated dorms and I saw the room advertised on the wall of a coffee shop. When I turned up to check it out, I don’t think they were expecting some young, awkward skinny kid with a backpack full of books. My street cred was probably in the minus numbers at that point, but they still let me in. The first thing I saw was that they had a piano in the corner of the living room. The landlord's I suppose. They weren’t using it for anything other than as a makeshift bar and catch-all, covered in clutter and dust and half-empty bottles of vodka. They were the kind of people who thrived on diversity though, so when I sat down and played something for them, they gave me the room right away. They called me _Little Mozart_ , which I always found pretty funny considering I had played them Für Elise thinking they would have recognized it.”

I laughed at the memory, and of my naivety all at once.

“Little Mozart,” Oliver chuckled, his eyes twinkling at my old nickname. I got the feeling he wanted to appropriate it himself. “I like that.”

“Yeah, they were great. They’d rag on me for being a nerd, I’d rag on them for not knowing even the most famous of classic books or composers. But they always enjoyed my suggestions, and I always made sure to open myself up to theirs. We’d drink together, smoke weed, talk shit about politics, complain about stupid things. You know, all the normal stuff people do at that age.”

“Sounds like fun. Very bohemian,” Oliver said. I pursed my lips in a way that said _I guess so._

“There were plenty of parties, that’s for sure. But it wasn’t always fun. New York was a lonely and bewildering place back then.”

“No doubt.” He nodded as if he had been there. “I thought of you often.”

“I’m sure my father kept you updated.” I _knew_ my father kept him updated. There was no other explanation for Oliver knowing exactly where and what I studied, and he had clearly kept careful tabs on my whereabouts even after I graduated.

“In a way, yes.”

Silence hung between us again, but this time with an awkwardness that had snuck itself in uninvited. I reached for my cigarettes to give my hands something to do, lighting one and handing it to Oliver, before doing the same for myself.

“You haven’t changed at all, somehow,” I told him with a gentle smile, pulling the ashtray close to me.

Oliver refilled my drink without even asking, and I got the feeling he was trying to relax me a little. I was no longer the loose-lipped boy he once knew, eager to talk and have an opinion on absolutely everything regardless of whether it was my business or not. My restrained nature was likely a surprise to him. I had always been eager to open up to people - I was known for wearing my heart on my sleeve - but lately I had found that being guarded was a far easier state to be in. I was starting to wonder if I was killing off the best part of myself.

I looked him over in the silence, let my eyes trail along the handsome curve of his jawbone and the perfect structure of his face. The way the streetlights were reflecting on his incandescent skin made it look as if he were made from pure marble. His whole being seemed to exist with an incredible sense of occasion, and I wondered how much longer I could have gone on surviving with only memories of him to keep me afloat.

Now that he was here in front of me, entirely real and still holding the power to completely undo me with nothing more than a look, all I wanted was to reshape myself into the boy I was when he met me.

“I can’t say you’ve changed much either,” Oliver replied, though I felt like it was a lie. I knew it was a lie.

He was looking at me now with a fondness that seemed to burn into my soul. I had seen it before of course - many times - but for a long time it had only existed in my memories. I had begun to doubt that it had even ever existed at all, and yet, here it was being sent back to me like a gift from that summer. From him to me. I felt a heat rise inside of me as I held his gaze, the sound of my heart now pounding in my ears. I was fearful that I was going to overflow in some way; like the banks of a river in a rainstorm I was going to swell and spill violently, destroying anything that stood between us.

I wanted to reach across the table and pull him to me, rough and desperate, and with an urgency that reminded him of what he had taken from me. I wanted to push my hands into his hair and re-learn every bit of skin on his body that I had once worshiped and kissed with indulgence. From the soles of his feet, to the heat of his thighs, to the delicate pulse of his throat, I wanted to reclaim his whole body as mine. I wanted to press my fingernails into the most tender parts of his flesh and tell him over, and over, and over: _you broke my fucking heart, Oliver_.

I was overcome, suddenly, with upset. I tore my gaze away from his piercing eyes and stared down at the liquor in my hand with a renewed sense of fascination. I took a sip, purposeful and slow, swallowing away the rising discomfort in my larynx and the stinging wetness of my eyes. I blinked once, twice, fifty times as I tried to come up with an alternative to the question I was burning to ask. The question that was rising in my throat like a fireball straight from the war inside my chest. The question that had been on my lips for decades, bitter and sweet all at once, which held the answers to absolutely nothing and absolutely everything at the same time.

The question, eventually, came out of my mouth so meager, so hushed, so timid and sad, that I almost wasn’t sure I had asked it at all.

“ _Why did you leave me, Oliver?_ ”

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not entirely happy with this one, but, alas, here it is! (There's only so many times you can read something before it all becomes a blur haha) There's a lot going on, so I really hope I have written this cohesively enough that you can follow. Please let me know what you think in the comments :)
> 
> If you want to read Oliver's original letter to Professor Perlman, check out the little fic I published it in called "Regarding Elio"

As Oliver’s eyes held my gaze, I was transported mercilessly back to Christmas 1987, and to the penetrating look he had given me the day he came into my bedroom and told me he was engaged to be married. I had reacted to his revelation - in a heartsore stupor that I did my best to disguise - by trying to coax him back into bed with me as if that would be enough to change his mind. As if one touch of my inner-thigh would undo whatever had been done whilst he had been home in the States, and he would unravel right there in my arms, on our bed, in our room, and become mine all over again.

He was looking at me now, some 20 years later, with that same pained, conflicted gaze. Though I wasn’t sure how much of that conflict was aimed at me anymore. It was as if all of the bones inside of him had crumbled under an invisible weight and was now entirely listless in my presence and the expectation of his response.

My impulse was to immediately retract the question and apologize for being so boorish. How was it fair for me to force Oliver to scramble together a justification for a choice he made a lifetime ago? Because it _was_ a lifetime ago, and his reasons - whatever they were - were almost entirely irrelevant now, their significance washed away with time that rendered them unimportant to our narrative. Yet, if my younger self had the emotional intelligence to understand exactly what his choice meant for me, perhaps I would have found the nerve to ask the question when it actually mattered. When it was not “ _why_ did you leave me?” but instead, “ _how_ can you leave me?

As an adult, who had since made plenty of my own decisions that had left others bruised and broken in their wake, I did not pretend to be unaware of the complex nature of choice. The way in which we navigate the paths of our life are not always so clearly observable. We do not always move with clarity, or with grace, or with any insurance that the signs we’re following are even pointing in the direction we wish to go in.

What answer was I seeking from Oliver, exactly? Did I even expect him to have one? Perhaps by not asking that question when I was supposed to, I had accidentally trapped my 17-year-old self inside of me, eternally longing for the answers he didn’t ever receive and was now breaking free from my ripened core to demand them.

The invisible weight that was seconds ago pressing down on Oliver was now pressing down on me, and I had no resolve left in me to backtrack on a question that turned out hadn’t even come from my mouth, but rather, it seemed, straight from my soul.

I watched as his eyelids closed in reprieve. He sucked in a deep breath through his nostrils, the kind of breath one takes when trying to gain composure as a wave of emotion threatens to break any moment, and held the air in his lungs for a beat or two.

“I was always going to leave, Elio,” he finally said. “I had to, you know that.”

I nodded noncommittally, though his words had not satiated my desire for clarity. They were steady, calm, tactful; entirely Oliver and without a single drop of contrariness. They seemed curated perfectly to pacify me, but all they did was graze a scab I was desperate to pick.

“You had a choice,” I told him. “There is always a choice.”

We could both sense the air around us growing tense as I spoke. The street was quiet by now, the nightclub nearby seemed to have closed its doors and the young patrons were long gone from the area. Only the occasional car engine came roaring past our balcony of remembrance, cutting through our hushed moments four storeys above them.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Oliver exhaled, shrugging his shoulders. ”But the choice is not always ours to make.”

“If you never had a choice then your actions were selfish.”

“Regretfully, I agree,” Oliver replied.

That was not the response I expected to hear.

“So it was all a sham?” I asked, “A bit of fun to make the long days pass more easily?”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“So explain.”

The space between us expanded immediately as a result of my exacting words, and I hoped that they came across as an appeal rather than a demand. There was a frustration dancing in his eyes that could have been mistaken for anger if one didn’t look closely enough. The sight softened me.

“Don’t you understand yet, Elio?” His voice was restrained, almost a whine. “I left because I loved you.”

“That’s what I tried to tell myself too, but it never made much sense to me.”

“Of course it didn’t. You wanted all or nothing. I couldn’t give you that. If I had even tried, the life you and I would have lived may not have been the one you pictured in your fantasies.”

“The only life I pictured was one with you in it. In whatever form that took.”

“God,” Oliver scoffed, a breathy laugh almost escaping from his throat. He leaned back in his seat and looked away from me as if my presence opposite him was painful to witness. He rubbed at his eyes with the lassitude of a tired parent. “You still sound like that impossible kid at Monet’s berm. So damn idealistic. It almost makes me wanna...” His words trailed off.

“Kiss me?” I asked, finishing his sentence in a way that was once endearing but now likely came across as conceited. I set my jaw as I waited for his response. His eyes snapped back to mine with a look that impaled me; cold, icy, pissed off. I held it firmly.

“Yes,” he admitted, his vexed expression not wavering from the pressure of my unflinching gaze.

“Do it, then.”

The words came out of my mouth like a playful dare, but there was nothing playful about the way I was looking at him. We must have resembled two alpha males in the Serengeti, staring each other down to see who would retreat first; who would show the first sign of weakness and withdraw their eyes from the fight. Oliver didn’t like being challenged when emotions were involved, that much I still knew.

But my dare wasn’t empty. I _wanted_ him to do it. I wanted him to push away the table that separated us, glasses and cognac and cigarettes flying everywhere. I wanted him to seize me like he didn’t dare that evening on my bed, and see if we still fit together like two pieces of an ancient relic lost at sea for centuries. I wanted him to take my face in his hands and bring his lips to mine, with all the kindness and patience he had offered me on the berm that day, and search deep in my mouth with his tongue for the remnants of our love. I wanted to know, after all this time buried and forgotten, whether he would come up from the trench of our affair with a mouthful of gold, or a mouthful dirt.

“This is the problem.” Oliver eventually said, bringing our unspoken protest to a halt. He reached for the dwindling pack of cigarettes in front of me and lit another, taking a heavy drag before continuing. “You still see me through those eyes. You still see me in Italy, at 24-years-old with my billowy blue shirt, like some kind of spectre floating around, trapped perpetually in that summer. If you could just step out of that world and look at this whole thing through the eyes of the adult you are now, you might understand.”

“I was an adult then,” I argued.

“Barely, Elio. Barely. Your youth was one of the things I loved about you. It was too precious for me to steal so selfishly.”

I exhaled sharply out of my nose, shaking my head at the thought that Oliver could ever steal anything of mine after all the things I had willingly gifted to him.

“I would not have felt that way.”

He laughed, snorting almost mockingly at me. “Of course you wouldn’t. Only the youthful think that their youth is indefinite. I _had_ to leave you. You had barely just discovered yourself. I didn’t want you to go into the most formative years of your life tied to something you barely understood. It would have been difficult, Elio. More difficult than you could imagine, for us to have anything more than we did.”

“Do you not think I know that?” My tone had gone from irritated to absolutely incredulous, and that loose-lipped boy - though uninvited - was finally finding his way back to the surface. “Do you think things have been easy for me, Oliver? Fuck you. You don’t know what I’ve been through. You married a woman, had a family, did everything expected of you. I was led down this road and it was going to be difficult regardless of whether you were in my life because I had the courage to be unashamed of who I was. Unlike _you_.”

My sign-off was intended to wound, and I regretted it almost immediately. My skin flushed red hot as Oliver visibly reeled at the accusation that his life had been, and potentially still was, a lie. His fingers gripped his glass tighter than necessary, and I’m sure he could tell that there was real, long-harbored anger lacing my voice. I couldn’t hide it anymore; I was bitter and resentful and it showed.

“Right. And where did you get that courage from? Huh? From your oh-so-terrible childhood? Fom your beautiful Italian villa and your incredible parents? From the freedom to explore your sexuality with someone who made you feel safe? Yeah, sure, what a goddamn triumph.”

My stomach coiled. I should have stood up and walked out right then, abandoned my quest for insight and left Oliver there as the ghost he was. I could pretend it was all a dream, or a fantasy, and go back to my life in B. where Oliver’s absence hadn’t been troublesome for years.

But I couldn’t move. I was welded to the chair somehow, that invisible weight pinning me down once more. I watched as Oliver stood up from his own seat and walked over to the edge of the balcony, resting his hands on the worn iron as he stared down at the building opposite. He had a look of intense calm on his face that only comes from moments of complete inner conflict.

The obvious dichotomy of how we were presenting ourselves right now wasn't lost on me - Oliver stood up with the self-assured posture of a man, and myself sat feebly in my seat like a humiliated child. It epitomized the entirety of our relationship, and it made me wonder why I had ever thought this could be something more than a fantasy of lust.

Like that stupid French knight, I finally found the courage to speak. “If it makes you feel better, it turned out that my little Italian paradise didn’t prepare me very well for the reality of life out there.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better. Why would it make me feel better?”

I sighed, pushing my tongue into my cheek. “All I wanted was for you to leave a door open for me, Oliver.”

I noticed the slight tremble of his fingers as he brought the last of the cigarette to his lips. “You really are quite stupid when it comes to this, aren’t you? Even Vimini understood better than you. How could I leave a door open? It was not appropriate for me to do so.”

“It wasn’t _inappropriate_. I was of legal age in Italy.”

He angled his body against the railings so that he could look at me as he spoke.

“That isn’t my point and you know it. What was I meant to do, Elio? Bring my 17-year-old boyfriend home to Reagan’s America? Think for a moment how that would have gone down, for both of us. Our relationship was not illegal, but it was not something many people would stomach or tolerate. Was I meant to walk you into that? You had not yet grown any armor to combat it. And you had not yet lived enough to know if that was a war you were even willing to fight. When I left I had hoped that you would take every beautiful moment we had together and use it to guide you. I hoped you would feel transformed, and loved, and look back on us in fondness. What I didn’t want was for you to hold onto it so tight that it hurt you even more. Clearly that is what happened.”

I looked down at my hands. “I guess so.” It was a poor admission, and an even poorer response to Oliver’s sincere words, but it was all I could muster in the moment. I wanted to tell him that I had walked myself willingly into that war he spoke of less than a year later, and that no amount of armor could have prepared me for it.

“I left with the best of intentions, believe me, for all the reasons that your father agreed with.”

“You -- you spoke to my father about it?” I stammered, my voice small and childlike at the mention of him. I was starting to grow tired of the way I sounded more pathetic each time I opened my mouth, and was on the brink of vowing not to speak a word again.

“Of course,” he said as if I was stupid. Perhaps I was. “He was the wisest man I knew.”

I nodded in agreement, my eyes swelling embarrassingly with tears; maybe for my father, maybe for Oliver, maybe for myself. I looked away and pressed the heel of my hands into my eyes, trying to will away this crazy confusing cocktail of feelings churning up inside of me, mixing in my stomach with all that alcohol I had been tipping down my throat like a pacifier. Calling that taxi and finally retreating to my hotel suddenly became the most appealing idea in the world.

But then I heard the sound of the door sliding open, and when I looked up from my moment of self-inflicted sorrow, Oliver was standing up in the shadows. The moonlight and streetlights were blending together on his face in a way that made his pale skin seem almost ghost-like, and for a split-second I wasn’t entirely sure he was even real. What if all this time he had been nothing more than a vision? An apparition of my unresolved grief?

“Follow me,” he said. It was an order, not a request. “I have something I wish to show you.”

 

*******

 

Just like Oliver did the day I summoned him inside the villa to play my transcribed version of Bach on the piano for him, I was now following him back inside his hotel room with the same guarded curiosity; docile and obedient. Unlike that day though, there was no playful or flirtatious coloring to our actions. Just two men, raw from memories, retreating into a darkened room for reasons yet unsaid.

Perhaps he was going to get naked for me, I thought to myself as I crossed the threshold. Perhaps he would lead me to the center of the room where the moonlight was shining in a silver column, and take each item of clothing off, one-by-one, to reveal his beautiful, taut body. _Off, and off, and off, and off._ His cock, hard and red, desperate to be reunited with me, presented boldly like an offering. An apology, of sorts.

Perhaps he would step forward, cock-first, and take my hand in his, wrapping my still-delicate fingers around the flesh I had dreamed of touching again.

“You remember how?”

“I remember how,” I would breathe, squeezing hard before dropping to my knees in submission, my lips and tongue ready to devour what they still considered theirs and had never, for a moment, forgotten the taste of.

With a loud click, Oliver turned on a lamp that filled the room with a warm orange glow, and it snapped me abruptly out of my salacious delusion. I had to blink away the thought quickly, before I found myself in a predicament that was less than attractive.

I watched him in silence as he walked over to the desk against the far wall, where his laptop and papers were sat untouched since this morning. I had all but forgotten that he was here to work, and marveled at the amount of chaos he had managed to generate in one day. I remembered the way my bedroom looked in his stewardship; cluttered and untidy, papers everywhere, books everywhere, an impossible amount of his things littering every surface.

Eventually, he located a small green folder. He unclasped the binding and carefully pulled an envelope out from inside of it. It was small, the once-white paper yellowed and scarred by time, edges soft and almost frayed.

I recognized the stock immediately as a letter from my father. He had sent me many over the years that now looked just the same as this one - just as muted and just as delicate with the same time-worn creases. Oliver turned it over in his hands, looking at it as if it was the first time he had ever seen it. His eyes were glassy but calm, like the ocean at midnight, and I was acutely aware of how quiet the room had become. It was as if we had found ourselves in the eye of a hurricane and we were waiting to be engulfed in pandemonium at any moment.

Finally he spoke, softly and slowly, and without raising his eyes from his hands.

“I wrote to your father about all of this after I left Italy. I was tormented by the decision to marry Eleanor or not. I didn’t know what to do or who to turn to. It was what everyone expected of me, but... my heart yearned for you.” He dared to glance at me, cheeks flushed uncharacteristically pink. I felt that coil in my stomach tighten further. “My letter to him was very honest and vulnerable, probably embarrassingly so. I wouldn’t wish to see it now. This letter is what he sent back to me. I thought you might like to read it.”

“Do you carry this with you everywhere?”

“No. But I sensed that perhaps now was the right time for you to see it.”

I nodded, taking the envelope and pulling the letter from it’s sheath. I didn’t know exactly what to expect from it's contents, but I was eager to find out.

The date at the top read _November 9th 1987_ . It was written twenty years and three days ago exactly.

 

> _Dear Oliver,_
> 
> _I am pleased the package reached you in good time and hope that your transition back to New York is going as smoothly as it can._
> 
> _Thank you for entrusting me with your previous letter. Your feelings are a true credit to you and the depths in which you love._
> 
> _I am sure I do not need to tell you that my son is a sensitive soul, with a heart the size of the sun and a sweetness even greater. He feels things very deeply, and this is both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. My job as his father is to help him guide these feelings to the appropriate harbor of his heart, but I cannot sail them for him._
> 
> _Right now he is terribly wounded. Do not let this blind your decisions. Elio, like all of us on this earth, will feel torment and heartbreak that renders him utterly anemic. É la vita._
> 
> _You may have been the source of his injury, but you are not obliged to be the remedy also. We must all learn that being broken is not a pass to receive everything we desire from the world. Sometimes we are dealt a hand that seems unfair, but that does not necessarily mean there has been foul play._
> 
> _Elio is no exception. He will heal, in time, with or without the soothing balm he wants you to administer._
> 
> _With this in mind, know that my blessing is with you to make a decision on behalf of both of you. You are right that he has youth on his side, but this is also a cause for blindness. He will decide his path in these coming years. He will decide his identity as a man. One cannot be sure what that path will have in store for him as he reconciles his feelings in a world that may want to beat down on him because of what or whom he longs for._
> 
> _He is the light of my life, but I cannot protect him from the dangers of shining too bright._
> 
> _That being said, I would not wish to. It would go against every cell of my soul to slander the purity of his. He is whole, and absolute, just as he exists right now. As are you, Oliver. Never doubt that._
> 
> _If your desire leads you back to us, you will be welcomed with open arms and a promise that your freedom with our son’s heart will be gifted to you. If it leads you to the more-traveled route where your conflict is left to rest, then we will wish you all the best in your marriage. Please know that both of these options are good and right._
> 
> _The intimacy you found with one another was undoubtedly beautiful. I was let in on so little, but what I witnessed through your veiled attempts at keeping the world out eclipsed even the most glorious days of our summer._
> 
> _Elio will understand, as he grows and takes into him all the heaviness of the world and the pains of life, that this does not erase your time together or the feelings you shared. There is a saying here in Italy that the people have used for centuries - “Meglio aver poco che niente”. It means that it is better to have a little than nothing at all._
> 
> _I regret that your heart and mind are not aligned in what you wish to seek in this life. It is a heavy burden to carry, and I am hoping that you will find some comfort in this letter as you make your next steps._
> 
> _I know with certainty that wherever you travel, wherever you are carried from here, you will always hold our corner of the riviera in your heart. In turn, I know that a piece of your heart will stay lodged here somewhere too, perhaps inside the very being of our dear Elio._
> 
> _With all of my love across the ocean,_
> 
> _Samuel Perlman_

 

This was the moment I had been fearing all evening, when my banks burst and the river overflowed, destroying every last bit of whatever poise I had left. I brought my free hand up to catch the tears dripping down my cheeks so that they didn’t fall onto this precious piece of history cradled in my hands.

Oliver didn’t speak. He just stayed where he was until I had found the strength to pick myself up from the overwhelming emotions that the letter had unearthed from within me.

“God, I miss him terribly,” I croaked, using the sleeve of my sweater to wipe my face.

“I can’t even imagine."

I lowered myself onto the chaise longue against the wall and stared down at the letter once more. I could hear the words spoken in his voice - loving and tender and always wise. I could tell they were cut from the same compassionate cloth as the words he spoke to me the very day I returned home from Rome saturated with sadness from Oliver’s departure. My father was always strides ahead of his time; not a judgemental bone in his body and totally and entirely transparent. He loved without restraint, and my love for him was, in turn, infinite. So much of me had died along with him, that upon reading the words he had written _about_ _me,_ it was like I was feeling a part of me come back to life. A part of _him_ coming back to life within _me_.

His acceptance of who I was then, and who I grew to be in my adulthood, was never something I questioned. But seeing it down on paper, sent across the ocean to the man who had led me to the shores of the life I wanted for myself, was a reminder of the part he played in whatever Oliver and I shared. He was responsible for bringing us together, and, in a way, was responsible for keeping us apart. Was he now responsible for our reunion?

“You should keep that,” Oliver gestured to the letter.

“But it’s yours.”

“It’s as much yours as it is mine. I’ve carried it for a long time. Take it.”

I ran a finger over the cursive of my father’s name at the bottom, relishing in the way he wrote Perlman almost the exactly same way I do - curls and inflections in all the same places. The name, likely, was to die out with me. And although that tormented me more than it probably should, I was beyond proud to have carried it as the final generation.

I thought about my father’s words to Oliver in his time of anguish, and let their spirit soak into me like a salt bath. As I steeped, there in the corner of the room, I realized that all this time I had been entirely wrong about the role Oliver had played in my adolescence. I had always thought of him as an antagonizer of sorts - the callous, cavalier American who rode into my life and stirred up all of my most conflicting feelings like a summer storm, only to leave me weeks later, flailing and disorientated in a flood of my own bewilderment.

But I was realizing now that Oliver was more like my own Christopher Columbus. He discovered me - landed upon my shores unexpectedly and unearthed all of the wonderful possibilities I held inside of myself. But that did not make me his to conquer, or rule, or protect. That was my father's job, like Perlman after Perlman, and _he_ did it with an integrity that would give scholars volumes of material if they could just get a glimpse of the imprint he had made upon my soul.

Oliver was not there that summer to father me. He was not there to mentor me, or teach me the things I longed to understand about the world. Oliver was just Oliver. A man who fell in love with me all at once, all too soon, and all too fast. He did what he could, with what he had. But beyond that, how could I ever expect anything more from him?

Oliver left because he had to; he had a life, a job, a wholly adult existence that could not ever realistically be transported to Italy to live in the bedroom of a 17-year-old boy entirely infatuated with him. But other than those obvious reasons, Oliver left out of respect for my _youth_. He left out of respect for me, and for my life that was still yet mostly unlived. He left because there was no greater kindness than to allow me the space to grow and blossom into the man I was meant to be, unencumbered by the intense presence of a first love, who he knew was never meant to be my only.

I would not put it past my father and his astuteness to know that the words he wrote to soothe Oliver’s unsettled heart would one day be used to soothe mine too. Perhaps he even knew it would be posthumously.

I felt my heart swell inside my chest so intensely that I thought it was going to burst and come out of my ears. But it didn’t. As usual, and without warning, it came out of my nose.

“Shit,” I gasped, feeling the sentimental fog of my brain clear abruptly. I cupped my hand to my face and looked to Oliver urgently as the blood dripped through the gaps in my fingers. He reacted swiftly, handing me a napkin that I bunched up into a ball and pressed against my face.

“I see you haven’t outgrown your nosebleeds then. Want me to rub your feet?”

“No thank you,” I shook my head, a small laugh muffled through the cloth at the memory.

“Are you okay? Should I go get some ice from downstairs?”

“No. No it’s okay, it’ll stop,” I assured him, pressing a little harder. He sat down next to me and let his hand touch my shoulder gently, rubbing down over my barely-there bicep soothingly with his thumb. Instinctively, I leaned into his touch. I let my head rest against him as I waited for my body to stop over-reacting.

“I think this is probably my cue to leave,” I said after a little while, the flow of blood slowing to a trickle and the soaked napkin starting to dry up in my palm.

“Not like this,” Oliver protested, standing up.

“I’m a big boy. I can handle a nosebleed.” I took the napkin away tentatively, waited to feel if the familiar trickle of blood would return.

“At least clean up first,” Oliver said, walking towards the bathroom and looking over his shoulder at me like a parent to a child. “Come.”

Hesitantly, I stood up and followed. The nosebleed had left me feeling a little lightheaded, so I used the wall to steady myself as I moved. In the bathroom, Oliver was holding a fresh flannel under the stream of warm water.

“Sit,” he said with an air of authority, but not lacking in sweetness. I did as I was told, gently lowering myself onto the edge of the bathtub.

I watched in needless wonder as he squeezed out the excess water and turned to me. With a tenderness that rivaled that of anything he had ever shown me, he crouched down in front of me and reached up to bring my hand, and the napkin, away from my face. He replaced both with the warm, wet flannel, and with the compassion I am sure he had extended to his children many times when they were small, cleaned the blood from my skin. He made sure to get every last drop; gentle, deliberate, precise swipes of the material against my face. He treated me like I had been uncovered in an archaeological dig, as if I would break if touched too harshly but who desperately needed to be cleaned to reveal the beauty that was once there.

Once he was satisfied I was clean, he let his thumb graze over the sharp angle of my cheekbone in a move that sent my body into silent hysteria. He was looking at me with a lopsided smile that told me he felt the same, and it took every ounce of the self-control I had acquired over my 37 years not to bring my mouth to his.

“Much better,” he whispered, voice hoarse from all the cigarettes he had disposed of into his lungs that evening. The tenor of his words sent a shiver down my spine.

I did not, _could not_ , breathe.

“I have to go,” I heard myself say with little conviction. I stood up from the bathtub much too fast, trying to hide the shaking of my limbs.

“If you insist.” He touched my elbow gently as if to say, _I’m here if you need me_.

What I needed was to leave, fast, before I did something utterly indefensible.

I rose from my position and walked back into the bedroom where I gathered my things, slotting my father's letter carefully into the pocket of my jacket as if the paper held his entire memory within it’s parchment.

“Elio,” Oliver said from the doorway of the bathroom. Nobody had ever said my name like he did. Flowers grew from every syllable.

“Yes?” I looked over to him.

There was a pause, and I could have sworn I heard the chorus sound of the cicadas coming in through the window, the distant crashing of waves on the rocks, the creak of the gate below our bedroom that would sway in the nighttime breeze.

“ _Mi dispiace._ ”

I shrugged, offering him a weak smile before lifting a phrase from my father's letter verbatim: " _È la vita._ "

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for being so patient with this chapter. I know it took a lot longer than the last, but I work 9 hours a day, 6 days a week, so I have to squeeze all my writing into evenings. I also decided to make some hefty changes to this chapter! Here's hoping you enjoy it anyway, and hopefully the next chapter won't take quite as long...
> 
> Please please please leave a comment if you read it - they mean so much to me and spur me on in my writing.
> 
> Also, I am slightly unsure of the accuracy or appropriateness of all of my Italian in this chapter. If anybody fluent spots any corrections, please let me know :)
> 
> xxx
> 
> Edit: I just wanted to add briefly, that I am aware that there is overwhelming evidence throughout the book, and the movie, that Elio is bisexual rather than gay. I actually strongly agree with that reading (but accept others may not), but in my story I have intentionally chosen to make Elio gay so as to give him a specific narrative to his life, in contrast to Oliver's. Hope that makes sense!

Morning came with an unseasonable dazzle of sunlight splintering in through the gaps of my hotel curtains. The way it cast thin pillars of light across my bed reminded me so much of summertime in B. that in my half-cut slumber I was convinced I could hear the sound of the breakfast table being set and the rich smell of coffee drifting in from the hallway.

When I eventually peeled open my eyelids, I had a few seconds of disorientation before I remembered exactly where I was. It had been a long time since I had woken up anywhere other than my stifling old bedroom at the villa.

The ache kicked in immediately. Right at the base of my skull where it met the tender flesh of my neck, vibrating down my body in an unpleasing shiver. I groaned, rolling onto my front and stretching out fully, trying to ease that ominous churn in my stomach that was no doubt only a prelude to the hangover looming over me. Last night’s discourse between Oliver and I was not only heavy on sentiment, but on alcohol too, and whilst I was no stranger to drinking, it had been a while since I had really indulged.

I lay there for a few moments, listening to the sound of a family outside in the hallway talking loudly in German, my ability to translate their words not as proficient as it once was, which I’m sure caused my father to turn in his non-existent grave. He always said that one should be fluent in at least four languages to even begin to understand the world’s complex and beautiful allegory.

The strangers outside were discussing breakfast plans, that was about as much as I could decipher, and as their humdrum chatter drifted away from my doorway, my own mind started to drift back to Oliver and the evening we had shared. If the idea was to liberate our two decades of near-silence, then we had no doubt obliterated our expectations by blowing open the gates with a force strong enough to send them flying off their hinges.

Those candid moments out on his balcony and the intense complexity of all that was said - all that was revealed - was overwhelming. I did not have enough coherence within me this morning to even find the right adjectives to describe such a night, let alone piece it together into a picture that felt complete. I needed a strong coffee first, and maybe two brufens.

Oliver and I had not parted on bad terms, though. In fact, quite the opposite. Despite my emotional desire to flee the scene at speed, Oliver walked me downstairs to the lobby and waited with me - like a lover might do - until the taxi arrived to take me home.

When it finally pulled up alongside us, headlights casting us in uneven light, I stepped forward barely an inch before Oliver wrapped his steady fingers around the joint of my elbow and turned me towards him. For a foolish, blissful moment, I thought he was going to kiss me.

In a breezeless voice that scarcely traveled the distance between us, the baritone of which conveyed far more than the words could have alone, he said to me: “I want to see you again tomorrow. Can I?”

It was Oliver’s trademark assertiveness, with his always-there seeking of consent. Never pushy, never forceful, always unselfish. His chivalry earned him only a nod, my own breath all used up on every other emotion he had pulled from within me that night. His smile reached into his eyes, radiating across his face, and that heavenly glint I still adored seemed to circumscribe us both in the moment.

I wasn’t sure if I would ever escape it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“My last lecture finishes at 2pm,” he said as he opened the taxi door for me, breaking the halo around us. “Text me a time and a place. I’ll be there.”

I took it as a promise, and without another word, climbed into the taxi, watching Oliver’s silhouette disappear behind me in the rearview mirror. It was only when he was entirely out of sight and completely unreachable that I realised I may have - yet again - missed an opportunity to seize him. What if that promise to see me tomorrow held only as much legitimacy as ‘ _I’ll stick around’,_ which I remembered all too well didn’t end with him sticking around at all?

At 44-years-old, Oliver was only 5 years younger than my father was during our summer together. Perhaps he was too old for these games now. Perhaps I was too. But it was interesting to think of how age changes our perspectives. How I would not have taken a second glance at a 44-year-old man when I was younger, and yet here I was, seeing Oliver and being no less allured by him than I was when he was half that age. I wondered if my own age had soured his view on me and my body, or if he desired it in the same indelible way I still seemed to desire his.

I attempted to wash my afflictions away under the pressure of a hot shower. But even there, as I tried to go over my itinerary for the morning and all things entirely non-Oliver related, I could think of nothing but him; nothing but his pale skin, his golden hair, the monarchial curves of his body that seemed to exist with a grandeur that one would more likely expect from a revered statue or piece of art.

 _My god,_ I thought to myself. Had I expected to fall prey to his unwitting spell so fast?

I thought the brevity of my trip would have spared me such a trapping. But I guess I always had been terribly naive regarding the power of my perennial infatuation with Oliver. It had survived this long inside of me with little to keep it alive - _of course_ it was going to come back with eagerness the second I offered it some food to feast upon.

As I soaked myself under the steaming water, I recalled the first time Oliver and I had showered _together_ \- something that later became commonplace during our deliberately lazy mornings at the villa.

It came after a short bike ride to S. turned into a long bike ride to nowhere. We had no destination, no time constraints, only a desire to be in eachothers company for as long as possible. We would stop whenever we were flagging, pull off our sweat-soaked shirts and wait until we were less sticky before finding each others bodies again. We must have made out in so many different pastures that day, under so many trees and so many clouds that were the only witnesses to our raw and frenzied desire to taste the other. I remember wondering if my lips would seem bruised or swollen when I got home. If my mother or Mafalda would be able to sense the gluttonous lust we had been exchanging with our mouths all day.

When we arrived home, both of us were drenched in sweat, bone-weary but giddy. My parents were not there - the villa uncharacteristically quiet, simmering in the late afternoon sun that was dipping behind the trees and making the old walls look as if they were burning orange with fire. The languid air outside sat still like an abandoned pool - when the water is unmoving and untouched, but still trembling ever so slightly with it’s own inability to contain its excitement.

We could hear Mafalda in the kitchen. She was preparing for the evening’s dinner, but other than that, we were near enough alone.

It was my idea to get into the shower together, but it was not me who found the courage to take the lead. I watched, in an almost pathetic pubescent awe, as Oliver undressed and stepped into the bathtub, his long legs scaling the edge with an ease I envied and adored all at once.

“Are you coming in or what?” he asked me with a raised eyebrow, letting the lukewarm water fall onto his face with a satisfied smile. He ran his hands through his hair and sighed with a pleasure so different to the sighs he had been depositing into my mouth all day, yet no less enchanting. I was hard just watching him.

I pulled off my clothes and joined him, clambering over into the bathtub myself with a clumsiness that gave my eagerness away, and pressed my body flush against his back. With an unabashed confidence that Oliver had unearthed in me during our nights curiously mapping each others bodies, I reached around his broad hips and took him in my hand. It was a strange position to be in; he was so tall and I was not. My face pressed against the top of his spine, kissing at the wet skin and breathing in the intoxicating scent of his body as I stroked him to the edge of orgasm.

It wasn’t long before I was begging him to be inside me, as was always the case back then. My greedy, desperate body could never contain itself when presented with a prize such as Oliver; naked and hard and staring at me - full lips agape - as if I was the most deliciously tempting creature he had ever seen. He never had to call me beautiful (though he often did), because his eyes did all the speaking for him.

I remembered the way he pressed my body against the tiles, carefully treading the line between haste and tenderness as he pushed my hands up above my head and held them there. His brawn meant I did not need to use my own strength to stay upright, but even if I had wanted to, my body had all but turned to pulp under his skillful embrace. Delightfully possessive but always gentle, Oliver fucked me that afternoon with a passion that was certainly loud enough to be heard in the hallway if someone were to pass by. We just had to assume, and hope, that nobody would.

It was worth the risk, because here I was, stood in a little shower cubicle in a little hotel in Rome, some twenty years later and still thinking about the feeling of his fingers deftly gripping my hips, his lips pressed against the back of my neck as he moaned my name, his body sliding inside my body like it was designed and destined to be there.

The memory had me touching myself, like I still did more times than I cared to admit, at the thought of Oliver’s cock heavy in my hand instead of my own.

 

*******

 

There was no time for breakfast. I took my pre-booked car from the front of the hotel late enough that the driver tutted loudly at my tardiness before joining the slew of traffic weaving the busy streets of the city. Timekeeping was not something the Italians were normally too concerned with, but it seemed the hustle of modern life was chipping away at the last of Rome’s relaxed charm.

My destination was Aventino, a neighbourhood about 6 km south of the city and home to Professor Giordano, who was my host during my graduate internship. Through the years we had stayed good acquaintances, like most professors did with their assemblage of protégés, myself now included. So, whenever I was in the area I would make the effort to drop by and catch up, trying to give back whatever I could in thanks for the wisdom he bestowed upon me during my time in his tenure.

As we idled in rush hour traffic, I decided to take the opportunity to call home.

“ _Pronto_.”

“Mafalda?” I asked. “Oh Gianna, _ciao. Va tutto bene?”_

She replied in Italian, telling me everything was fine and that my mother was just helping Mafalda clear the breakfast table. Yesterday was a good day, she said, despite my absence.

I waited for a moment, static from our old phone ringing in my ear before she took the receiver and greeted me.

“Elio! _Ciao_ _tesoro_!” I could hear Gianna somewhere in the background gently encouraging her to sit down.

“ _Ciao_ _Mamma_. How are you?”

“Oh I’m wonderful, sweetheart. Just fine. How are you?” She was no doubt beaming. I could hear it in her voice, though it did nothing to dispel the swathes of guilt I felt for being away from her. Before I could answer her first question, she asked me another. “When are you coming home, Elly-belly?”

“In a few days I think. Not long,” I assured her.

“Why don’t you and Marzia come for dinner tonight? Bring the girls.”

“Mom, I’m not at Marzia’s,” I corrected. It was not a logical thought that I would be there - Marzia lived barely fifteen minutes away from us and I would regularly go back and forth, but never stay overnight.

“No? No, of course not.”

“No, Mom. I’m in Rome, remember?” I said it calmly.

“Oh yes! To see Giordano.”

“Yes. And to see Oliver,” I reminded her. I probably would have omitted that fact, but it was not fair on my mother’s mental state not to reinforce the things she had been told. I was trying to help her remember things, not confuse her further.

“Ah, yes. Oliver.” She paused and sighed as if she was picturing him stood in front of her right that second. It was entirely possible that she had forgotten his brief visit in the summer. _“Il cauboi,_ ” she mused, before mirthfully correcting herself: “ _Il tuo cauboi._ ”

 _Your_ cowboy, she had said to me.

 _My_ cowboy?

She had never referred to him in that way before. Never. Not once. There was something playfully knowing in her voice that floored me. Is that how she saw him? As _my_ Oliver?

When the call was wrapped up, I had to open the window for a while to stop myself from overheating. I didn’t know if it was still nausea from the hangover, or if I was allowing my propensity for melodrama to take over. Probably it was both.

 

*******

Professor Giordano and his would-be husband lived in an impressive 18th century palazzo, which they had decorated and furnished with great sensitivity to the baroque era it was born from. Although extravagant beyond all of my tastes, it really was a beautiful home, and they always welcomed me into it with warmth and a great display of hospitality.

Giordano had much to show me that morning. His erudite enthusiasm for his very specific area of academia never failed to impress me, and the tall windows flanking his office framed beautiful vignettes of Rome before us. He spoke _at_ me mostly, flitting around the room in a flamboyant cloud of fanaticism that might be irritating to some but was nothing more than amusing to me.

I listened to everything he had to say with polite interest, welcoming the moments of distraction that displaced Oliver, if only for a while, from the epicenter of my thoughts.

I stayed long enough for lunch, the _aperitifs_ served beforehand tinging my cheeks slightly as my hangover finally gave up in the face of a hearty meal. After eating more than my fair share (this was never an insult to the Italians), I made my excuses, kissed them both goodbye, and offered loose promises to return very soon.

I had already text Oliver earlier that morning - as per his request - during a brief moment of respite in Giordano’s office.

It read: _‘Temple of Asclepius, Villa Borghese. 3pm. Can you be there?’_

His answer was a simple: ‘ _Absolutely.’_

 

*******

 

“It has nothing to do with Asclepius. Not really,” I said as we both leaned against the fence that circled the edge of the water, overlooking the temple on the other bank. “It’s beautiful, but it’s just an extravagant landscape feature influenced by some lake in England. In fact, this whole park is designed to mimic an English garden. It’s not very Roman at all, and definitely not very Greek.”

Oliver looked at me with an expression that would have seemed like boredom had I not known any better. That expression quickly morphed into a smile, and then a short laugh, though it seemed to be at my expense.

“Is it possible to find anything you do not know?”

I pushed up from the railing and sent a raised eyebrow in his direction. “You can read that information right there. No need to be an expert,” I countered, gesturing to the large tourist information board over his shoulder. “I don’t know, Oliver. Ask me about airplane mechanics, or embroidery, or website coding. There’s plenty of things I don’t have a clue about.”

“You have a grace about your knowledge though. Always have done. And the fact that you’re so unaware of it is what makes it so charming.”

The blush that fired across my face was hopefully disguised by my already reddened skin. It was a pleasant day with clear skies and brilliant uninterrupted sun, but the temperature was far lower than it was the day before, and the windchill held a sting. My delicate cheeks, still as soft and pale as ever, were always the first to go.

I didn’t respond to his words, just continued to walk along the path that weaved its way around the circumference of the lake. Oliver moved with me, as if attached via some magnetic force.

The brisk autumn weather had attracted many visitors to the park that day, mostly people with young children or dogs. A black labrador on his afternoon walk came up and sniffed curiously at Oliver’s leg, and I watched as he reached down to pet it cheerfully before being called away by its owner. There was something thoroughly enjoyable about watching Oliver interact with his surroundings, as if I was learning his mannerisms all over again. Did he have a dog back home in New England, I wondered?

I didn’t realise I had asked the question out loud until he answered.

“We used to. A beagle called Woody. Josh named him after the cowboy in Toy Story.”

“I’m allergic to dogs,” I told him. “And cats. Not rabbits though, weirdly. Papa got me one when I was about eight after I begged him for a year. I ended up creating a presentation for him with all the arguments for why I should have a pet. I had a flip chart and note cards and everything.”

“A presentation?” he laughed. “You Perlman’s really are something.”

“Mhm. It worked, though. I named him Elton.”

“After --”

“Yes,” I cut in. “After Elton John.”

“Wow,” Oliver smirked at me, trying impressively hard to suppress a loud, hearty laugh. It didn’t really work.

“Shut up,” I grinned. “I was a big fan at that age. I’ve no shame in it. Elton’s a fantastic musician,” I shrugged, trying to save face. I understood what he found so amusing.

“No, no,” Oliver held his hands up in defence. “I agree. It’s just an interesting choice of namesake for an eight-year-old boy.”

“My second choice was Tchaikovsky. I don’t think I was your average eight-year-old boy.”

“No, I’m sure you weren’t. I was fifteen then. No doubt you were smarter than me already.”

I walked us further along the winding trails, making a point of passing through all my favourite spots from my time living there. I pointed out the route I would jog in the mornings and my favourite place to read my books in the afternoon sun in lieu of the berm. Oliver seemed interested in my reminiscing, at least in part, and smiled at each spot that held a ghostly image of a younger version of me. A version he probably recognised more than the one stood next to him.

“Did you live here for long?” he asked.

“No, only for a few months. I was here over the summer as a research intern. Not too unlike your residency actually."

“Is that the professor you were with today?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “He was a colleague of my father’s from his time at Bocconi. He arranged for me to stay with him before I moved to Oxford for my doctorate. I assume it was no coincidence that he was gay. I think my father was trying to help me find my people, so to speak. A safe environment perhaps, after New York. He took quite a shine to me that summer.”

“Oh?” Oliver raised a teasing eyebrow.

“Not like that,” I chuckled, shaking my head. “He says he saw a lot of himself in me. I think it was comforting for both of us. He’s completely ridiculous, way over the top. You wouldn’t like him at all I don’t think. But he taught me a lot of valuable lessons both personally and academically.”

“That is what a residency should do,” Oliver weighed in.

“I’m thinking of reprising my father’s role as _il professore_ next year _._ I’ve been back in B. permanently for three years now, and I don’t imagine I’ll be leaving any time soon. I teach an online course for Oxford, which is great, but it doesn’t really satisfy that need, you know? It’s not the same as being there with your students.”

“Yeah,” he nodded in agreement. I knew he would. “I think that’s a great idea. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who could learn much from you, and vice versa. My students continue to surprise me every year with how much they teach me. Besides, it’s not the worst place to spend a summer.”

“I know. And now we even have wi-fi,” I enthused jokingly.

“Well, shit. Sign me up,” Oliver laughed. “I’d send one of my boys if I could, but neither are even remotely interested in classical or romantic literature.”

“You and your boys are welcome any time, Oliver. I mean that.”

We continued onwards, skirting the edge of the park and doubling back on ourselves slightly. After a few moments of comfortable quiet, our legs striding in time with one another, Oliver said something I didn’t expect him to.

“I’m getting a divorce.”

I looked up at his face which was set firmly on the ground, his expression unreadable. I wondered what made him offer this fact to me at this moment precisely. Had he been waiting to tell me? Or had he just said it to fill the silence? I remembered the email where he mentioned that he had moved house, but I hadn’t considered that perhaps that move was alone.

Sincerely, I said: “I’m sorry to hear that.”

He gave a nod that was more of a shrug than anything, and stuffed his hands deep into his pockets. “It isn’t really news anymore, it’s been on the cards for a while.”

“Why?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. It was a prying question that I had no business asking.

“We just weren’t in love anymore,” he said simply. He didn’t seem to find my question rude, but I didn’t press it any further out of respect. He and Eleanor had been married almost as long as my whole adult life. I couldn’t imagine that was an easy parting for him. It put my pining for a six-week summer romance to shame.

“Have _you_ found love, Elio?”

The question hit me like a volleyball to the temple. Suddenly the conversation felt like a setup, orchestrated to pry something out of me that I had not yet offered him a glimpse of. My neck grew hot under my thin scarf. Was my answer meant to include him, or was that a given at this point?

As if arriving on time to relieve me, a group of cyclists rounded the corner in front of us. We moved over to allow them room to pass, and I used the distraction to try and hide my discomfort, fiddling with the hem of my sleeves and subconsciously keeping my body angled away from him.

“Well?” Oliver pushed back, as soon as the sound of their tyres were behind us. We were stood now by the winter flower garden, and I pretended to be admiring the clematis nearby to delay my answer even further.

“I -- Yeah,” I nodded feebly, “Yeah. Once or twice, for a short while. But like all good things...” I trailed off, leaving my sentence unfinished, worrying my bottom lip between my teeth.

“With boys?” he asked.

This amused me more than it should have.

“With _men_ ,” I corrected, a smirk tugging at my lips. Oliver intercepted my playful jab at his expense, his laugh self-deprecating. “Marzia is the only woman I have ever loved. Still love.”

“Yes. How is she?”

“Wonderful. Beautiful. As are her daughters,” I mused with genuine happiness radiating through me. “Her youngest is named Elia. Seven-years-old and smart as hell. Not too unlike Vimini was.”

“Elia?” He clocked me as the namesake. “That’s very sweet. You always seemed very important to one another.”

“They’re the closest I will ever get to a family, I suppose. She still lives nearby, with her husband.”

We venture together into the garden, flowers displayed in tall brick beds at waist height. Oliver seemed indifferent to them, far more interested in me than any of the natural beauty around us. It made me uncomfortable, like I was on display somehow, but flattered all the same.

“Have you always been openly gay?” Oliver inquired. “Throughout your whole career?”

Unlike Elio of the late 80’s - when I was reconciling with my identity and wrestling with the fear of labels that projected my sexual desires to the world - the word gay no longer sent me into a meltdown. It didn’t send me into a panic of locating ears within earshot. It didn’t send my stomach cold or my skin clammy with nerves. It was just a question, with an answer.

The one and only time Oliver had used the word in my presence was to ask me - after a not-so-rare moment of emotional vulnerability - if I thought I was gay. My wide-eyed response, like a child being asked a question they had been fearing for weeks, was to bury my face in his chest and mumble, “Please don’t ask me that again.”

He never did, and I was thankful for it. But my answer now was transactional. Easy, and without a drip of shame. I embodied the pride that comes with years of living as a gay man, even if I did not proclaim it in ways others might. It was ironic to me now, that Oliver and I seemed to have swapped roles in that sense.

“Yes. At least, as much as I could be,” I told him, sitting down on a nearby bench, flagged on each side by the flowers. He followed suit, rubbing his hands together and stretching his long legs out in front of him. The sun was beginning to descend, and with it came an even more biting chill in the air.

“Good. I admire your courage.”

“It’s not courage,” I disagreed without a beat, looking at him seriously.

He seemed taken aback by my curt response, but didn’t yield. “No? Then what is it?”

I gave a heavy shrug. “Stupidity? Arrogance? Take your pick.”

“Well, I think it’s brave,” he argued, and it sounded slightly patronising. “Coming out back then was not as easy as it is now.”

I don’t think it was intentional, but his words dripped with the arrogant presumption of a man who knew nothing of what he was talking about. Coming out was never about ease, but often an emotional necessity to not always be running from one's self.

Were his words praising my decisions, or reassuring his own? Because if there was one thing I was learning about this new version of Oliver, it was that whatever desires he had let roam free for six weeks in Italy all those years ago, were now so deeply closeted that I wasn't sure he even knew how to find them again.

“Brave,” I repeated his word slowly, staring down at the gravel under my feet. I shook my head at a question that wasn’t asked. “I’ve paid for that bravery in many ways, then.”

Oliver’s head snapped towards me, the abruptness of his reaction forcing me to meet his gaze.

“Paid for it _how_?” he asked.

His tone was slow and investigative. It reminded me of when he asked me ‘ _What things that matter?’_ at the Piave memorial many years ago, when I first found the courage (real courage) to open up to him about how I felt. He probably barely remembered the moment, let alone his tone, but his voice was seared into my memory.

I saw something akin to fear flash across his blue eyes that were holding mine, and it didn’t take me long to realise the conclusion he had jumped to in his mind: An openly gay man, who lived his college years through the height of the AIDS epidemic, telling him that he had _paid_ for his frankness regarding his sexuality? It was understandable that those thoughts would enter his brain. I couldn’t exactly disfavour him for that, but it did make my skin prickle with unease.

I wondered if this had crossed his mind when he was cleaning the blood from my face last night, or if it was only now dawning on him as a real possibility.

“I don’t have AIDS, Oliver. If that’s what you’re asking me.”

The air seemed to stand still around us for a moment, and it was a credit to his character that he didn’t try to deny it. He looked away shamefully as I continued to speak. If my response brought some relief, he didn’t show it.

“But clearly I don’t need to tell you how cruel the early 90’s were on people like me, in a city like New York. I’m not one of the brave you speak of.”

“I’m sorry. I just --”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said quickly with a firm shake of my head. My intention wasn’t to make him feel bad.

I pursed my lips together in thought, leaning fully against the slatted back of the bench. I made a tutting sound behind my teeth, a gesture aimed at myself as I let a stream of consciousness fall from my lips despite not really wanting to. There was a feeling of safety in this moment with Oliver that melted away the guarded nature I had been appropriating since I arrived.

“I had an arrogance in those years that I don’t ever wish to revisit. An overwhelming sense that the world owed me something, when actually I owed everything to the world. I’d been groomed by my parents to be entirely proud of who I was, but when you figure out who that is and the world doesn’t always agree with you, that pride can become your downfall. There’s no bravery in ego or pretension when your friends are dying en masse.”

Oliver replied solemnly. “I imagine not.”

“It’s a wonder I came out unscathed, really. I can think of a dozen people who deserved to be here over me. Smart, kind, beautiful people who were no more stupid or reckless than I was.”

My survivor's guilt was starting to seep through the cracks in my words, and I didn’t care. Not even the most vulnerable parts of who I was now could shame me in front of Oliver it seemed, even after all this time. At this point though, it all felt a bit like word-vomit.

“Don’t say that, Elio,” Oliver pleaded softly.

I looked up into his eyes again, as if seeking refuge from my own thoughts. As bright and calm as the ocean in August, there was always something arcane about his eyes that trapped me in a kind of harebrained wonder. In just a few blinks I could be swimming in those sumptuous blue pools for hours if he would let me, and back when we were together, I would have been happy to drown in them.

Now, his eyes had every nerve in my body firing against my skin, and I wondered what it would have been like to never see them again. Would it have been easier to be denied them all this time because I was dead, or because we were forced apart?

I thought of the people we had lost in those terrible years when the virus ran rampant and gave us little time to breathe between funerals. I thought about all the people I cared for who died too soon, and wondered who’s eyes _they_ were being denied right now. Who’s eyes _they_ were missing like I had been missing Oliver’s.

One of them, I hoped with an overwhelming bleakness, was missing _mine_.

“My boyfriend died from it.” I spoke the words abruptly, though quietly, into the space in front of me. I sensed that my candor had taken him by surprise, as it did myself, and there was a silence that stretched on long enough that the conversation could have ended right there if I allowed it.

Oliver appeared frozen, unsure of what to say. My word-vomit continued - the bile burning my throat as I spoke.

“I was volunteering at the AIDS outreach center in Alphabet City. I was the guy who would hand out the forms and process them, and when I got his back I noticed that his name was French. Sébastien - with an e and an acute accent. I said to him, in French, that I hadn’t met many French boys in New York. He replied in English that perhaps I didn’t know where to look. Turned out he only had a cursory command of the language, could understand more than he spoke. His father was from Paris, but he had never been able to afford to take him back there.”

“That’s a shame,” Oliver slipped in faintly, filling my pause.

I nodded. “I got him there, though. We stopped by on our way to B. the summer before he died.”

“Did he enjoy it?”

“France or B.?”

“Both.”

“Very much so,” I nodded. “He preferred B. though.”

“Well, who wouldn’t.” Oliver’s expression was mirthful, and any discomfort I was feeling talking about Sébastien slipped away.

“You always have disliked France,” I mused, sucking in a deep breath.

“No I haven’t,” he protested calmly, “I just find the French somewhat brazen at times.”

“The Italians find the Americans somewhat brazen at times,” I pointed out, smiling up at Oliver who tried his best to look offended.

I was still looking at him when his face eventually softened, and his body was so close to mine on the bench that I could have reached out and touched any part of him if I dared. I desperately wanted to, so much so that I had to physically sit on my hands so that I didn't - too scared to break the charm we had conjured up between us, of a closeness bound together by an unspoken agreement to resist.

“Elio, I’m -- I’m so sorry about your boyfriend. Truly.” His words sounded shattered, as if he had soaked up my grief and lived it all right there and then in the brief moment of silence.

“It’s okay,” I replied honestly, my eyes glazing over only a little. “It was a long time ago. The wounds are just scars now.”

Still, I pictured Sébastien - forever 23-years-old - stood next to Oliver and imagined how they would look together, so different yet so similar. I tried to envisage what they would say to one another, how their voices would sound in tandem, whether they would greet each other with kindness or ill will. How would they feel towards the other knowing that they were part of such a small, elite group of people who got to be with me so intimately but who were both taken from me all too soon for wildly different reasons?

I wondered if Sébastien would think Oliver selfish for being alive and denying himself the things he wanted most, when others didn’t have time left to make those decisions. I wondered if Oliver would feel envy for the years Sébastien spent with me that could have been his, had he found that bravery he was so fond of congratulating me on.

How would my love for them compare when viewed side-by-side? Quick arithmetic was never my forte, but I think I had well over a thousand more days with Sébastien than I had with Oliver. That would win by a mile, surely? I loved him with every inch of my heart, deeply and passionately, with an inexplicable amount of sorrow left behind in his absence.

How then, did I still feel that Oliver eclipsed him in some way? It felt distasteful - selfish even - to smear his memory with such a thought.

“You would have liked him, Oliver,” I said, still speaking of Sébastien. “Very much. He was not brazen like the French.”

“I would like anyone who loved you,” he replied softly. My stomach fluttered like it hadn’t in a long time.

“But you would have liked him in his own right,” I told him firmly. “If you had been sent to his parents home instead of mine, you would have fallen in love with him, I’m sure of it.”

“Well, I guess there’s a parallel life where I do. And I look forward to living it and meeting him.”

My heart clenched in a hundred different ways at his words. It was one of the kindest things he had said to me all afternoon, and he had said plenty of kind things to me.

Right that moment - as I was talking myself down from doing something stupidly brazen myself - a cold, icy gust of air blew our way, reminding us that the evening was beginning to set in and the sun was dangerously close to crossing the horizon behind us. If we were to stay there much longer we would freeze to death, or worse, drown in the bitter cold swell of sorrow that I had forced us to sit in for too long now.

I jumped up from my seat with a boyish vigor that took Oliver by surprise.

“ _Andiamo Americano_ ,” I said brightly, a small smirk dancing on my lips as I kicked away the inertia that had settled between us. I held my hand out for him to take, and pulled him to his feet with a smile designed exclusively to elicit one of his own. It worked, and I was delighted.

“Go where?” He held onto my hand longer than necessary once he was on his feet, and I instinctively held my breath. What would happen if I never let go?

“To find coffee. I’m freezing,” I said, reluctantly letting his hand slide from mine.

We walked out of the garden and back onto the main promenade, making a beeline for the west exit and the twinkling lights of the streets coming alive for the _aperitivo_.

“How long do I have you for?” He was referring to the evening.

 _What a question_ , I thought.

I smiled warmly up at him, reviving a term of endearment I had once used in abundance. “For as long as you want me, _amore mio._ ”

Then, as if to prove all of my cavalier assumptions wrong, Oliver reached between us and wrapped his cold fingers around mine in a homecoming that transcended every emotion I had felt that day. I could feel the courage in his grip - the bravery even - and the weight of his lifelong turmoil came crashing down around me. 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this took three whole weeks. I am SO sorry, but it seems that's just how long it takes. I am painfully critical of my work, so each chapter takes an eternity to get through the editing stages I'm afraid.
> 
> Thank you all so much for sticking around and being so kind. I really hope this isn't all too slow or boring. The next chapter should have the "progress" you're all waiting for. Hope you like this update anyway!

Like most seventeen-year-olds, I was entirely sure I was the most hard-done-by person on earth. Whenever I was sad, I was, of course, drowning in a sorrow nobody could possibly discern. Nobody had ever felt anything akin to the agony flaming inside me. Nobody. Not one single person. I just knew it to be so, regardless of what everyone else would tell me, or how familiar I was with some of the most sombre texts in existence that proved otherwise.

That is the nature of being a teenager, I suppose. Every emotion is magnified, undiluted, expanded beyond all reasonable perception. It distorts reality into a pixelated haze, heightening all other senses like someone who had lost their sight. Oliver’s ‘departure’ - as I had grown to name it in my mind - did not escape this emotional metamorphosis.

It would be remiss of me to claim that I despised every second of it though. Because I didn’t. Once the ‘departure’ had downgraded in scale from an unbearable catastrophe to a more appropriate feeling of melancholy, I found that I could live with the pain without letting it submerge me entirely. Much sooner than I anticipated, I started to wear my heartache like a badge of honour - like a boy scout who had scaled some kind of challenge and returned to his troop bruised and broken, a face full of tears but entirely pleased with his injuries; for it signalled that he had suffered something. And those who have suffered are worthy not only of comfort, but of attention and praise.

That is how I began to view myself: as something worthy of - even entitled to - attention and praise. I was hurting because I had experienced something _worth_ being hurt over. And just like my pain, I was sure that this was entirely inimitable, and therefore rendered me a martyr of sorts.

In moments born from utter self-pity and the quiet certainty that the whole world was conspiring against me - I would dig deep and find my inner bravado. It began as a misguided coping mechanism, something perhaps inspired by Oliver’s macho demeanor in the face of disquietude; a surface gallantry designed to ward off scrutiny.

But soon enough I was walking around our home in Milan with a puffed-up sense of importance that I don’t think endeared me to anyone. Not even my mother, who quickly became disenchanted with the newly-adopted attitude she never expected from her sensitively raised Italian-American son.

Once school started up again, I intentionally tried to carry myself differently - doused in an air of budding masculinity. I wanted everyone to know that something had happened during the summer break to ignite such a shift in my disposition. I tried my best to act mysterious and aloof, like all the brooding leading men in the romance novels I devoured at a faster pace than I would ever admit.

I’m sure people found me unbearable to be around; puffing on my cigarettes like some coltish, callow version of James Dean. Reciting poetry I didn’t really care for to impress girls that I cared for even less, as I revelled in my own teenage disillusionment that I, one day, would be able to credit this time of my life as what made me one of the greatest modern romantic poets.

Because I had lived through something! Like those who had come before me; Plath, Keats, Poe, Blake; I had lived through pain, I had battled sorrow, and I had channelled it valiantly into my words as an act of depressive defiance that people would one day write papers on for their literature classes.

Except my poetry was, as you would expect, utter nonsense. Overly-sentimental, irrational drivel that could only be produced by a teenager trying far too hard to embody their heroes. Sometimes I would even write by candlelight, a theatrical flair that my father found rightfully hilarious.

“My little _sui generis_. So sad, so strange, so sweet,” he would tease, petting my curls like a puppy as I shrugged away from his touch. “Whenever you’re ready, Lord Byron, the 20th century awaits with dinner.”

It was just like him, I thought, to compare me to Lord Byron - a leading figure of the romantic movement who was rampantly honest about his sexual relationships with men, and who happened to be one of Percy Shelley’s closest friends. It sometimes seemed as if my father knew _everything_ that had happened between Oliver and I that summer, right down to our quietest of conversations.

Before long, the cracks in my facade began to show. My fabricated role of the suffering poet no longer served its purpose. If it had a purpose at all. And more often that not I would return home from school, the burdensome weight of my forced bravado slipping away in the privacy of my mother's company, and sob in her arms like a child. I had lost myself somewhere; perhaps between the legs of girls I took to bed to prove something to myself, or between the frantic words I wrote about Oliver through every lonely night without him.

It would take the rest of that school year, and many unrelenting conversations with my parents, for me to learn that becoming the person I was destined to be didn’t require anything other than what I already possessed - including the anguish I was trying to stifle with my game of charades.

When Oliver wrapped his fingers around mine just by the gates of Villa Borghese on that chilly November afternoon, I thought of that boy and all of the overwhelming chaos of his mind. I thought of his confusion, his attempts to feel away his feelings in ways that did not align truthfully with his character, and wondered if Oliver was still trapped inside that state of ambivalence.

The thought saddened me. I had grown out of that tumultuous phase long ago, and could not imagine how battered my insides would be feeling had I had clung to that useless bravado and lived with it for my entire life. As I was swept through my formative years of college and grad school - an explosion of experiences that gave me little time to dwell on Oliver too fiercely - I found clarity in my life, despite the longing. I found friends, lovers, deep happiness that solidified my experience with Oliver as an awakening of who I was meant to be.

Had he not found the same? Had the outcome of _his_ suffering not been clarity, but instead a life of denial? A game of smoke and mirrors not just for others but for himself?

He had not given me any verbal signs to form this reading of him, but my connection with Oliver, expeditious and silent by nature of how it formed, had somehow remained incessant. I did not need to hear his feelings spoken out loud, I could sense them regardless. And now, I could almost feel the desperation permeating his grip. The pleading words being spoken to me through his simple gesture, from his hand to mine: _please, help me make sense of this._

I did not know if I could. But when Oliver’s thumb grazed gently over my knuckles in a way that didn’t necessarily bring back a specific memory, but felt distinctly like a retracing of some kind of path we had both previously traveled, I had an urgent need to ground myself. A need to anchor myself to the moment before it sailed away without me.

In one swift, easy movement, I lifted his hand to my face and pressed a kiss to the soft flesh between his thumb and forefinger. I let my lips linger there, taking in the feeling of his skin against mine, looking up at him with eyes I knew were doe-like. He smiled back at me through a trembling exhale, and in an echo of our unfairly finite summer, the moment was gone as quickly as it arrived.

Just like that, my hand was empty again.

“Coffee, then?”

A nod. A smile. A silent acknowledgement that I did not have any idea who this man stood in front of me was, but that I would not be going anywhere until I did.

“Coffee.”

 

*******

 

An americano for the Americano and a cappuccino for myself, we were settled into the seats by the window of a nearby _caffetteria_ looking out over the blue-tinged streets. Early winter twilight was rapidly approaching, a blanket closing in on Rome and wrapping itself around the city’s ramparts like a mother swaddling a child. This was always my favourite time of day - regardless of where I was in the world - because it always felt so comforting, so reticent; the sky teetering precariously between light and dark, as we teeter even more precariously between today and tomorrow - shedding the burdens of the day, but not yet taking on those of the next. A wonderfully freeing sense of serenity if we allow it.

That is why, in the humbled and relaxed culture of Italy, the time between twilight and midnight is when people are at their most indulgent, their most acquiescent.

“So, what do your highly conservative parents think about you being a registered democrat?”

Somehow, as we waited for our drinks to arrive, our conversation had turned to the state of American politics. If there was one thing Oliver was good at, it was moving focus swiftly away from the sentimental and back into the quotidian. A coping mechanism of his that I had learned from before, and the rationale behind his impetuous (but otherwise charming) _Later!_

Ah, that American stoicism: bold and blunt, but as precarious as the edge of a knife. For once I just embraced it, for it was Oliver after all.

“My highly conservative parents,” Oliver started, dunking his amaretti biscuit into his coffee with a child-like enjoyment. “Have no influence on my political affiliations. Or any other affiliations for that matter.”

I nodded as if congratulating him, sipping at my cappuccino with a satisfied sigh. “Do you think Obama has a chance, then?”

“At winning the primaries? Absolutely.”

“But you don’t think he can become president?”

“I think it’s a nice dream, but I think that’s all it is.”

“Well, change can only come from those who dream,” I shrugged, sounding artlessly poetic. I knew Oliver would rib me for it at least a little, and his snorting laugh confirmed my suspicions.

“You are a romantic, Elio.” He smiled at me warmly, as if this fact filled him with a great joy. It was not a sweeping statement either, for my Ph.D. was literally in 18th Century and Romantic Literature. One could easily argue I was an expert by this point.

“And you’re not?” I asked.

“No,” he shook his head, pushing the last of the biscuit into his smiling mouth. “I believe I’m what they call a cynic.”

“An ancient cynic or modern cynic?” I quizzed, cocking my head to the side. We had moved unintentionally into his area of expertise now. A brief dance around our respective faculties.

“Both, perhaps?”

“Neither,” I answered my own question, shaking my head. “I can’t imagine you happily living in a barrel on the streets of Athens like Diogenes did. Not just because I can’t imagine they make barrels large enough to accommodate you.”

He chuckled, flashing me a glimpse of his impossibly perfect teeth, and the sound penetrated me as one that could soothe almost anything inside me. It was pure, unguarded, everything I remembered fondly from nights curled into his side, lips pressed against the nape of his neck as I said and did whatever I could just to make him laugh once more. There was a time when that laugh was the only thing I wanted to bear witness to after twilight set in. And if I could bottle it up and take it home with me, perhaps I would never feel hurt again. Perhaps it could cure my mother’s illness, slow down Mafalda’s ageing, heal any wounds still left to be inflicted upon me. Perhaps it could fill the cavity that had opened up inside me very the moment we said our final goodbye at Fiumicino airport.

Oliver ran his fingers through his hair as he sipped on his drink, lost in a moment I wasn’t being let in on. He caught my gaze and held it for a while, searching my eyes for something.

“It’s a nice thought though, isn’t it?” he said eventually. “To rid yourself of all possessions and live a virtuous life.”

I hummed a semi-agreement, thinking for a moment before speaking slowly and intentionally. “The cynics said that we should live our lives according to our own nature. To reject conventional desires and societal norms. To seek a life of honesty.”

“Yes,” Oliver confirmed, seemingly missing my point and thinking I was asking for a fact-check. I wasn’t. I knew enough on the subject to carry my own, he of all people should know that.

“Yes,” I repeated, raising an eyebrow at him.

Could he not see the parallels at all? Did he truly believe he was living a life of honesty? The back of my neck grew hot as I considered that perhaps I had read him entirely wrong. Could the unspoken connection I was so sure of actually just be me being presumptuous?

I watched him eventually read the veiled meaning on my face, glancing away from me bashfully as they sunk in.

“Well. Perhaps I am more of a _modern_ cynic, then,” he relented. I suffocated a smile between my lips.

“No, you are much too soft for that,” I told him, and his now curious expression made my lips finally crack apart. Soft is not a word that Oliver would use to describe himself, and yet I did not believe my comment to be wrong. “On the inside, at least,” I clarified.

“You think?” he asked

“Yeah. Like a _sfogliatella.”_

“A what?”

I laughed at my silly analogy, but stuck with it. “Remember those shell-shaped pastries Mafalda would make? With the orange ricotta inside?”

“Oh my god,” his eyes widened, slamming his huge palm down on the table hard enough to rattle our drinks and catch the momentary attention of the two old ladies sat near us. “I do! They were so good. You used to dip yours in honey.”

 _The things one remembers_ , I thought.

“Yes,” I laughed at his enthusiasm. “I still do. And Mafalda still hates me for it.”

“You should never try to improve on a chefs work. Especially one as peevish as Mafalda”

“No, I suppose not.”

Wanting to continue moving away from the Elio-centric conversation that had absorbed our time inside the gardens - including the accidental unearthing of Sébastien’s memory - I took the opportunity to probe Oliver with questions about his life back home. I was careful not to ask directly about Eleanor, for fear that the sentiment surrounding their divorce was still unprocessed or painful for him. I did not want to be the one to stick a finger into a seeping wound he was still trying to nurse.

I was curious about his children though, and wanted to know all about this now-integral part of his character that I had never met. I wanted to know all about his life as a father and the two humans he had nurtured into adulthood. My relationship with my own father was so poignant and precious that I could not imagine somebody not seeing their children as a work of art, no matter how nuanced or chaotic or unfinished they were. Essentially, I was asking Oliver to show me his greatest piece; the products of the last twenty years of his life that he was most proud of.

“Josh will be nineteen in the spring, would you believe? He started at Cornell in September, studying architecture. That’s what he wants to do, be an architect. He’s always had a very technical brain, you know? All the stuff I was never too good at: math, logic, spacial awareness.”

“Wow,” I smiled, my hands tucked up against the warm cup in front of me. “Smart kid.”

“Yeah. Cornell actually has a faculty here in Rome. They choose 60 students each year across a handful of disciplines to spend two semesters here. He’s working on his application right now and I’ve been giving him a crash course in Italian to get him started. I’m resisting the urge to show up this weekend and put a good word in for him, though. I have a few acquaintances at Cornell that I could namedrop...”

“Oh god, don’t be that guy,” I insisted quickly, on Joshua’s behalf. “Let him get in on his own merit. I’m sure he will. Though I know from experience having a surname that runs in those academic circles doesn’t really require much brown-nosing anyway.”

“Our surname is not as esteemed as yours. The Perlman reputation precedes you. I still hear your name tossed around at Harvard at the most disarming moments.”

“Really? Me or my father?” I chose to ignore his comment about it being disarming. I couldn’t really process the implication that my name alone could cause such a reaction, despite knowing from experience that a name was more than enough to throw your whole day right off course.

“Both. Sometimes even your grandfather,” he smiled. “Our literature department is very fond of you though. Have they ever approached you?”

“Yes. A few times, actually. And I always declined.”

“Why? Because of me?”

“Because I was happy at Oxford.” I answered too quickly. “I had no desire to leave. Not until my mother needed me to take a sabbatical and come back to Italy. I lived there on/off for the best part of a decade. I still have a home there, right by the Thames, which I hope to return to one day. The remuneration at Harvard is ridiculous. I think they expect everyone to scramble to work there because of that alone. But I don’t think I would ever want to settle back in the States.”

“Never?” he frowned.

“I don’t know. I doubt it. You must enjoy it at Harvard though, you’ve worked there for a long time now.”

He shrugged unconvincingly. “As you said, they pay well and I have two sons to put through college.”

I nodded. “I’ll cross my fingers for Joshua. I’m sure he’ll get into that program.”

“I’m sure he will too. I just hope he isn’t too disappointed if he doesn’t.”

“We all have to deal with our perceived failures. Part of the joys of growing up. He’ll bounce back,” I said confidently. “What about Alexander? He must be, what, sixteen now?”

“Sixteen, yeah. And don’t we just know it. He’s uh… how do I describe Alex?” he looked thoughtful for a moment, tapping his fingers against his now stone-cold cup like a metronome. “He’s a free spirit. Got a mind of his own, you know? Challenging to parent but rewarding to love.”

“I imagine many boys are,” I replied. “Does he know what he wants to do after he graduates?”

“Well. That’s a bit of a battle right now. He says he doesn’t want to go to college, is refusing to even apply. But he doesn’t have any other ideas on what he wants to do, except play guitar and smoke pot.”

I had to laugh at that. “You Americans are always in such a hurry. He’ll figure it out, give him time.”

“I’d like him to figure it out in a classroom,” Oliver replied unnervingly stern. “He needs structure.”

“Of course.” My inflection was intentionally soft so as to draw a comical contrast to Oliver’s sudden austere wording. “Or perhaps the army? I heard that’s good for structure too.”

Oliver raised an eyebrow at my sardonic suggestion. “Are you mocking me?”

“A little. Do you make him call you ‘sir’, too?” My lips twisted into a smirk.

“No, but he doesn’t call me _Papà_ either,” he teased back. “You’re probably right though. It’s just hard to relate to a kid who has that rebellious streak. I was always such a rule follower. A people pleaser. I was much too afraid to disobey my parents wishes.”

“Yeah? And how did that work out for you?”

My question had the ability to wound and I knew it, but I didn’t say it with any viciousness on my lips, only a desire to be timingly facetious - as was always my smartass way. Precocious even in adulthood, it seemed.

He didn’t answer. Which itself answered my question from earlier: No, I was not being presumptuous, but I was perhaps being a little cruel.

I wanted to point out to Oliver that these acts of non-conformity come in many forms, and that he may relate to Alexander more than he thought if he looked past the surface details of what he considered his ‘rebellion’ (though I wouldn’t consider a 16-year-old smoking pot and being disenchanted with academia as anything more than normal). To many people, Oliver’s sexual relationship with me - a boy 7 years his junior and not yet legal in parts of his own country - was a rebellion in itself. It certainly felt to me that we had rebelled against all societal expectations of the boundaries of love; rightly or wrongly.

I didn’t say this to him though, as I still held the sense that Oliver saw our terse romance as a shame on his character - a scandalous blot on that page of his life. After all, once our private summer was over, the bubble of his 6-week emotional reprieve popped, he succumbed straight back to the world of social propriety. Perhaps Alexander would do the same given enough time.

I gave him a look, but didn’t press it any further. In fact, I decided to pull back, allowing him the space to talk further about his boys - something he did effusively and with a great amount of pride. I had no doubts that he was a wonderful father, involved in their lives and concerned about their happiness in a way I don’t think his father ever was for him.

I listened closely as he blessed me with a few sweet tales from their childhood and spoke of their characters like they were the protagonists of his favourite novels, painting an oral picture of his life with them that I found to be both lovely and laborious in exact equilibrium. I was smitten with the image of him with children in his arms. But the barbs of jealousy were already springing to life within me. The sharp spikes of the rosebush that circled my heart in his presence pricking spitefully at the thrumming muscle, whispering: _this is what you could have had, Elio._

In bed all those years ago in B., when he became _me_ and I became _him_ , I felt so much a part of him and his body that I did not think anything could surpass that feeling of intimacy. We crossed many rivers in those weeks. We did things that exposed us in the most beautiful, erotic, vulnerable ways. The boundaries of our love together seemed to transcend all symbolic walls, and the feeling of _being_ one another no longer felt only emotional, but physical. When I kissed his skin, I was so sure that I was kissing skin that was mine. I had taken his body inside my body, and he had taken mine, and in doing so we had left a visceral mark on each other that could never be undone. Each time we made love, it felt as if we were swapping atoms, blending further into the other, gifting each other our insides in a way that was so transposable that it seemed impossible to trivialise. We were whole when we were together, but only as one. Apart, we were just half, and whatever half we were was irrelevant because every part of us was interchangeable.

When Oliver ate my peach and let my semen come to rest inside his body, I knew then that we had reached something truly special - the metaphorical peak of our passionate communion. His gesture brought me to tears. Not just because I held some shame or that I was overwhelmed, but because I had reached such an emotional meridian that I could not do anything with my expanding love for him except weep. I haven’t since come anywhere near finding an intimacy so profound or affirming, and suspect I never will.

Now, his children were evidence that, unlike me, Oliver had surpassed our apex of intimacy and entered a realm that I had always been excluded from. In the creation of two children, grown and born physically from the love making between him and his wife, and quite _literally_ from his semen left inside her body, I realised that this was possibly the most beautiful, sensual, intimate thing two people can do together. A spiritual and physical high that Oliver had conquered only a year after leaving me behind in Italy, where I was still clinging onto the memories of every touch, every fuck, every last drop of him that touched my lips or lingered inside me. To him, the consummation of my peach probably seemed like nothing more than a fetishised moment that we had prescribed some deeper meaning to during an emotional high. But for me, it remained very much an ultimatum.

I thought of Marzia and her two beautiful daughters, who I had watched grow from the moment they were conceived, and who could have been mine had I wanted them to be. Instead, they refer to me as _Zio,_ and as I watch Marzia mother them with a blinding brightness that could soften the hardest of souls, I am often struck by the unfairness of the consequences of my decisions to be _this_ version of Elio Perlman.

Did I _choose_ to be childless by way of choosing a life that did not involve the love of a woman? Did I _choose_ this life of placid loneliness by refusing to mold myself into someone maybe only slightly removed from who I am today? Did I make decisions that seemed right and truthful in the moment - in and of myself - but which led me to an emptiness that could not be filled with as many nieces as Marzia could bless me with?

In turn, did Oliver make the choices he made all those years ago so that he would not miss out on these moments that he was now speaking of with prideful fervor? His children were living proof of his existence, a transferring of his DNA, his knowledge, his love. Not a copy, or a version, but a resounding echo of him - like I was of my father - that would live on past his death. A beautiful, tangible, permanent mark on the world via the soul of another human he gave the gift of life to.

From the other side of the river to Oliver, sat in the empty nest of my life, I could see why someone would not be prepared to give that up - not even for love.

I was painfully, painfully happy for him.

 

*******

 

After a while, a young girl working at the _caffetteria_ awkwardly asked us to leave if we were not going to be ordering any more drinks. My cheeks flushed when I realised we had thoroughly outstayed our welcome at one of the prime tables in the room, the busy establishment bursting at the seams around us as we blissfully ignored everything that wasn’t each other.

I apologised repeatedly as we gathered our jackets, whereas Oliver just laughed his way through the awkwardness like always. He even tossed his trademark _Later!_ to the staff still watching us as we walked through the door and into the bitter cold street outside.

Neither of us had much knowledge of the local area, so we pulled our jackets tightly around ourselves and wandered with a vague sense of purpose in search of somewhere to eat. A few streets along, we happened upon a Spanish tapas place which was busy, loud, and had a table available for us immediately. That was enough to entice us in from the cold.

We were both well on our way to being drunk by the time we left the restaurant, thanks to the expensive bottle of manzanilla sherry Oliver had ordered for us to share as we ate. Despite it already being fairly late, it was clear that we were not yet ready to part company. He suggested we find a bar, under the transparent guise that he still owed me a martini from our evening in New England five years ago. What a _goose,_ I said to him, and my nostalgic quip made us both fall about laughing _._

I had entirely forgotten what a gorgeous drunk he was. How his body seemed to soften from it’s statuette form, limbs relaxing, expressions buoyant and youthful, the distance between his inner and outer selves slowly collapsing. I wanted nothing more than to crawl all over him and take advantage of his suppleness; press my body into his and watch him mold to my form like putty.

I took us by taxi to a little bar called _Spirito_ , a favourite of mine hidden away on one of the cobbled streets right off Piazza Navona. I wondered if Oliver knew the streets of Rome well enough to realise how close this brought us to via Santa Maria dell’Anima. I didn’t care to ask, though, because I knew I would visit that spot before I left like I always did, but I also knew that I absolutely could not be with Oliver when I did so.

 _Spirito_ was technically a gay cocktail bar - somewhere I used to frequent in my younger years that I enjoyed because of it’s quiet, friendly charm and live music. I did not warn Oliver prior to arriving because I didn’t think it mattered. But as we approached, I saw him eye the rainbow flags strung up along the facade of the building opposite with a guarded nervousness that forced me to address it.

“It’s a gay bar. You cool with that?”

“Of course,” he said defensively, adjusting his jacket and clearing his throat in an act of macho-ism that made me recoil a little. Over-compensating already, and we hadn’t even set a foot through the door yet. Bit by bit, he was telling me everything I needed to know.

“Mhmm,” I hummed sarcastically to show my distaste in his new demeanour.

Once inside, I led him across the room towards the bar where I quickly caught the eye of a bartender and ordered two godfather’s, a mix of amaretto and scotch whiskey that I knew he would like. It didn’t feel like the moment for a martini. Better stick to the manly drinks, I figured.

The young barman, a tanned boy with long blond hair and boyish good looks regarded Oliver with intrigue as he prepared our drinks. Oliver could not disguise his discomfort, and I took a childish pleasure in watching him as he paid - giving the boy a handsome tip for really nothing at all, except perhaps indirectly for being very handsome himself. Tipping was not customary in Italy, at least not for standard service, and Oliver knew this. He was clearly flustered.

“Don’t worry. You’re not gonna get pounced on,” I smirked around the rim of my glass as we moved away towards a booth. I was finding the whole thing very amusing.

“That’s not my concern,” he equivocated quickly, looking around with an apprehensive curiosity.

“Oliver it’s 2007, relax. You’re acting like you’ve never been in a gay bar before.”

“Well, It’s been a long time since I have.”

“It’s really just the same as any other bar,” I assured him as we sat down.

“So why call it a gay bar?”

I frowned hard at that, feeling a little vexed. Was he that ignorant to it, or was he just so far removed from all this that he couldn’t possibly understand?

“It’s called community, Oliver. For some people that matters.”

He looked down at his drink, shame spreading across his face like a balefire. Of course he wasn’t ignorant to it, but he was an exile here after all. I may be comfortable in these surroundings, but for Oliver it was like having a mirror held up to his face already knowing he didn’t care for what it showed him. I softened at his softness.

“Does anyone know about you?”

“What about me?” he asked bluntly.

“About…” I trailed off, his touchy response throwing my intended question off course a little. “You know...”

“Us, you mean?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I had meant it in a more general sense, but I figured that was a good enough start.

“No,” he shook his head. “Not a soul, other than you and your family.”

I felt my heart sink into my stomach, sloshing around in the pool of sherry collected at dinner. I guess that was my legacy then; our love reduced to nothing more than a secret. Should I have expected anything different? I took down a mouthful of my drink and rested my arms on the table, my body language settling in for conversation.

“What did you tell Alexander when he found your copy of Armance?”

This question had been playing on my mind for a while, and now that I knew that Oliver certainly had not told his son the truth, I wanted to know exactly how one talks their way out of such a thing, whether he condensed us even further - like fractions being reduced to their lowest common denominator - into something entirely unrecognisable.

“I told him it was a gift from someone I had fallen in love with when I lived in Italy…” he trailed off, clearly wanting to just leave it at that but catching onto my desire to know more. He continued somewhat reluctantly. “I translated the words for him. Told him it was a quote from the poet Paul Celan. He asked why it was signed off ‘in silence’, what was meant by that… so I told him that sometimes love has to be silent in order to exist.”

“And what did he say to that?” I coaxed.

Oliver took a deep breath, gulped on his drink with purpose.

“He said that no love should ever be silent. If love is silent then you condemn it to an early death. It kind of blew me away. I didn’t think he had that kind of romanticism in him. I guess he’s more like you than I thought.”

“He’s smart. Perhaps you could have told him the truth.”

“That was the truth,” he argued.

“It was a _version_ of the truth,” I corrected. “Do you think his thoughts on it would be different if he were to know the person you fell in love with was a man?”

Oliver’s eyebrows scrunched together, the lines of age on his forehead visible for just a few short seconds. “Do you think I raised my sons to be bigoted? Of course not.”

“Then why did you think he couldn’t handle the truth?”

“It’s not about whether _he_ could have handled it, Elio. The issue lies with me.”

“Are you ashamed of it? Of us?”

“A little, yes.”

“Why?” I could not disguise the tremble in my voice as I said it.

“I guess I just think about whether I would like someone to treat my sons the way I treated you, and the answer is almost always no.”

“The way you treated me? Oliver, you treated me with nothing but kindness,” I objected quickly.

“But you were young. Much too young.”

I could hear clearly now how his conflict over my age had resurfaced. I imagine it would have been impossible for him not to draw parallels between Joshua and I once he turned seventeen, and now that he was parenting boys perfectly straddling the age I was then, no doubt he was going over his actions from before with the scrutiny of a parent who wants to keep his children as pure as possible for as long as possible. I sympathised, but the reality was that his sons had the right to have sex with whoever they wanted to, as long as it was legal and consensual. Just like we did.

“And I was careless and selfish. I broke your heart and took your --”

“Oliver.” I said his name firmly enough to make him stop speaking, but with a tenderness that asked him to stop worrying too. He fell into silence, watching me with those hazy eyes that expressed six hundred things all at once.

“I thought we went over this last night?” I said. “I _hope_ your sons have an experience like I had that summer. Do you have any idea how much of a teenagers wet dream those weeks were? God, it was like something out of a movie - in a good way. Yeah, sure, I was hurt. But it was a consequence of it, not an innate part of what you did. I wouldn’t trade that hurt for what I experienced with you. Would you?”

“I don’t think so,” he said contemplatively, before quickly strengthening his answer. “No. No I wouldn’t. You just still seemed so hurt by it last night and --”

“Last night was…” I searched for the right word. “Overwhelming. That’s all. Those weeks, months, years after you left were full of confusion for me because of a million things. I was naturally going to attach that pain to you because you had unearthed it. What you said, what my father’s letter said, it all made sense. There was no chance for us, not in reality. I’ve always known that deep down, I think. I just could never truly accept it because the naivety I had at the time could never be displaced retroactively.”

“I never, ever, wanted to hurt you, Elio.” The pain was evident on his face as he spoke, wound tight into the contracted muscles of his forehead.

“I know,” I smiled, reaching over to touch his wrist. I desperately wanted him to understand that I harboured no resentment towards him over it, but did not know how else to tell him. I figured he had to come to that conclusion on his own, without my persuasion. “I guess you’re just my Achilles heel,” I added off-the-cuff.

The reference made him smile, melting away his anxiety as he turned his hand over to touch mine. It was chaste, barely there, but enough to make my heart bounce befittingly.

“Does that make you my Patroclus, then?” he asked.

“I suppose. In a way,” I shrugged.

“In a way,” he repeated my words, smiling softly.

“I didn’t follow you quite as eagerly as Patroclus followed Achilles straight into the trojan war.”

“No. And I wouldn’t have wanted you to. It got him killed,” Oliver reminded me.

“That’s true, but he was the love of his life. He had a courage I never had.” I washed my saccharine comment away with another mouthful of my scotch cocktail.

“I don’t know about that. Your character drips with certitude. I’ve never known anybody so sure of themselves in my life.”

I laughed, literally, in Oliver’s face. The boldness pushed him back in his seat slightly, fingers tracing the rim of his glass as he looked me over with guised bemusement.

“You don’t really know me at all then, Oliver,” I explained. “I’m not as confident as you seem to think I am.”

“I didn’t say confident,” he insisted firmly, before elaborating. “Being self-assured isn’t always explicit to being confident. It takes a certain kind of person to own their vulnerability. I always thought you had that in abundance because you were so young, but it seems that it’s just a natural part of who you are.”

“That’s funny, because that’s how I always saw you. You always seemed to be sure of who you were. Arrogantly so.”

He laughed at my honesty, nodding in agreement. “I suppose I was, until you unraveled me. You saw what I presented to you. Underneath I was not so calm. Like a paddling duck, it seemed smooth on the surface but underneath? I wasn’t sure of anything.”

“But it was not the first time you had slept with--”

“No.” He cut me off before I spoke it out loud. Was he that squeamish about it all? “But it was the first time I had fallen in love with a man I had slept with, or even allowed myself to get emotionally involved at all. I’d always held those encounters at arms length. They were quick and indulgent and clandestine. But you were… different. It was the first time I had questioned where my life was heading or how I should identify. Somehow you managed to break down the facade I had built for myself, and that gave me the courage to just exist freely… for a while. With you.”

“And then you just rebuilt it all? The facade?”

“I didn’t know what else I could do,” he said. “You read the letter. I was lost, just trying to do right by everyone. Perhaps at the expense of myself.”

I could see how much of the Oliver I knew had been stamped away by years of his own self-denial. Fear, shame, regret, all likely balled up inside of him like a sickness that never went away, as he lived the life expected of him; the dutiful husband, the doting father, a pillar of straight, white masculinity. What a burden to bear when you had been given a taste of the liberty you knew you could never embrace, perhaps never wanted to embrace, but desired nonetheless. Our insular summer was his final taste before the real world married him back into their heteronormative regularity, without ever knowing he had strayed into the life of a boy whom he had taught to love every part of himself unabashedly.

The irony was painful. I wanted desperately to hold him. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and comfort every aching part of his body that had been throbbing for years underneath his stony exterior. I wanted to break that facade down for him again, piece by piece, even if it was for somebody else’s gain. Because if it meant that the rest of the world could meet the Oliver I fell in love with, then it would be worth it.

“More drinks, gentleman?” The waiter’s thickly accented English cut through our conversation like a blunt knife. I had almost forgotten we were in public, not out on Oliver’s sequestered balcony like we had been the night before.

“Oh. Sure,” I nodded, smiling up at him. “Two of the same?” The waiter just nodded and scooped up our empty glasses onto his tray, spinning on his toes and disappearing.

When I turned back to Oliver he was staring at me with a look of complete emotional abandon. His ethereal gaze touching every inch of my body, caressing me without touch, undressing me without words.

“I’ve never loved anybody like I loved you, Elio.”

I stared back at him, butterflies erupting in my stomach with wild abandon.

“ _Loved?_ ” I asked carefully, emphasising the past tense. This was not the first time he had used that word, but I was ready to challenge him a little on it now. He leaned forward slowly.

“You are a linguist, Elio. A writer of some of the most complex and beautiful prose I have ever read. Don’t pretend you don’t know I’m using that word as a past participle, rather than past tense”

My lips twitched, desperate to smile but not wanting to give in just yet. I put a pin in his comment about my writing, noting it for later. “I’m not. You used one past participle, one past tense,” I corrected.

He smirked, the skin around his eyes folding beautifully into lines I wanted to kiss. His handsome gaze tore right into my heart like the arrow sliced into Achilles’, and whilst I knew he was not trying to wound me, I also knew I was already bleeding for him. I think I had been for a while now.

“Has anyone ever told you how insufferable you can be?” he asked.

“Yes,” I nodded, mirroring the shape of his lips. “Many times.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another huge gap between chapters - I know, I know! I'm so sorry to keep you all waiting. This one was really tough for me to write and I almost threw in the towel completely haha. So I really hope you like it! Let me know what you think in he comments - I love reading them :) This could reasonably end here, but I think I have a another chapter or two left in me...

Between the two of us we managed to sample almost all of the house cocktails _Spirito_ had to offer. The unique combination of flavours and mix of spirits piqued Oliver’s interest. As an ex-barman he was a self-proclaimed alcohol aficionado, and the menu seemed to get his officious seal of approval. I think it came as a surprise to him that a bar aimed predominantly at the LGBT community could be anything other than a sea of leather and neon. But then, we were also in Rome. And whilst _Spirito_ did buck the typical trends of gay nightlife, it wasn’t an entire anomaly either.

As a young man, barely 23-years-old and still gripped by the after-effects of grief that followed Sébastien’s death, the bars and nightclubs of Rome became my summer playground. The warm familiarity of an Italian summer and the cultural charm that the city exuded was a welcome break from the philistine noise of New York, which - for all of its sense of community - now had an air of betrayal in its aura.

Giordano offered a relaxed and regenerative environment for my residency that made the summer feel like a reprieve from my grief. My host was especially liberal in his attitude towards sex, despite his age, and within 24 hours of my arrival had sized me up entirely and offered a list of bars, cinemas and bathhouses that I may wish to visit in my search for Rome’s _bei ragazzi._ I was no prude by this point, but Giordano was the lascivious type, and I turned beet red when he told me he knew many men who would harden at the pure sight of me.

“I know you are still in mourning, _mio_ _caro_. Many of our kind are. But nothing soothes a broken heart quite like the thrill of a good fuck.”

“I’m not sure that’s what I’m here for, Professor,” I admitted coyly.

“Oh Elio, Elio, Elio. You are here to have fun, no? I will not keep you with this research more than a few hours a day. The rest is for you to do as you wish. So please, go play!”

So play is exactly what I did. Despite my initial apprehension, I soon found myself absorbed into the enigmatic world of Rome’s gay scene. My days went as expected - a mixture of research, reading, jogging, transcribing music. But by night I found a second wind, and casual sex became my main pastime. Not just as an outlet for my pleasure, but - as Giordano alluded to - also for my pain. I was not a boy anymore. My muscles were firmer, my hair longer, my body more experienced. My Americanisms were, all of a sudden, my greatest charm. I was so used to my European side being my appeal that I found an unexpected joy in appropriating a bolder, more brazen personality to entice the men of Rome. And in the knowledge that I would be in Oxford by the time Autumn hit, I was not afraid of being seen as promiscuous.

Somehow I commanded attention in bars whether I wanted to or not. I lured others to me with my youthful and eager scent, danced around in a tangled web of sexual encounters that was reminiscent of my freshman year before I met Sébastien. It was enjoyable and freeing - some of the people I met were fine lovers and fine men, but most of what I was doing was void of any real emotion. I’d let guys fuck me in the bathroom stalls of nightclubs, clothes barely out of the way as we chased a quick high together. I’d give blowjobs to borderline strangers in humid alleyways, knees bruised and lips eager for the taste of completion. I’d bring younger boys home to my annexed room at the palazzo where I would delight in their innocent, wide-eyed bliss as they preened under my skilful fingers and the lewd lashings of my tongue.

And like any self-respecting whore, I somehow ended up with two regulars who would continuously seek me out at my favourite haunts, sneaking me away from the cacophony of desire I roused in those around me. When I found them together one evening, watching me from across the street as they shared a cigarette, I realised they were conspiring to have me at the same time. I eagerly consented, letting them press the small bottle of poppers to my nostrils to enhance the experience. To this day, I can say that night was perhaps the most carnal, disgusting sex I ever had. The pain and remorse I felt the next morning was enough to put an abrupt end to my summer of sexual abandon.

Those days were far behind me now, and my shameless exploits nothing more than another brief memory of my years of self-discovery. _Spirito_ was not where I came to find a hookup - though that occasionally happened - it was where I came to find community. The clientele here were slightly older and much more refined. The interior was less gauche and the music more to my liking. I remember thinking at the time that Oliver would probably enjoy the atmosphere of the venue - the laid-back charm, the drinks, the music. I never thought for a second that I would find myself sitting there with him so many years later.

I imagined myself walking in through the door with my leather jacket and skin-tight pants - my brushed back curls a departure from the boyish fluffy mop I had sported through my teens. Would the Oliver sat in front of me now be drawn to that young man? Better yet, would I have been drawn to _him_? I began to wonder whether we were a product of pure luck of the universe, a collision of chance that only materialised because of a very specific and unique set of circumstances that led us there. What if my 23-year-old self caught the eye of a 24-year-old Oliver - perfectly preserved and still tanned and spritely from his weeks in B.? No barriers in age, no barriers in distance, no barriers in identity. What then? Would we collide with more promise than before? Or would we walk straight past one another, completely oblivious to a parallel life where we fell deeply in love for an unfairly short time?

I watched Oliver sit impassively in his seat opposite me, his gaze being pulled towards the flirting faces and the buoyant bodies of _Spirito’s_ clientele against his will. I could recognise the desire in his eyes as one many men had suppressed - even around me - and it reminded me so much of our stolen nights at _La Danzing_. I remembered watching him one evening, long before we ever kissed or even touched, his body moving to the beat of the music in a gawkish way that could only come from someone who, at 6 ft 4” and built like a rugby player, needed a deep level of inebriation and a sense of anonymity to be comfortable doing so.

I was immediately transfixed, not by the dancing of course, but by the self-assurance that he was free to do as he pleased, free to enjoy the moment blind to any judgement being directed his way. I was captivated by the confidence of this unabashed American usurper, and the way women flocked to him like a swarm of bees - desperate for even the smallest serving of his foreign pollen.

And yet, I did not know at the time whether I loved him or hated him. All I knew was that I felt something potent and compelling that made me snake onto the dance floor like a serpent, weaving in an out of the girls still buzzing around him and hoping that he would notice me in the crowd. Something that made me lick my tongue into Marzia’s mouth right in front of him so that he could see that I, too, had women that wanted me.

I was an emotional drunk back then. Wistful and amorous, likely to wrap my arms around any friend I could find - boy or girl - and declare all of the reasons I loved them. I’d move with a lightness in my steps, twirling and spinning to expel the glee that bubbled inside me from really not much alcohol at all. My lithe body moved with grace. My dancing colourful, fluid and a touch flamboyant. If I thought my sexuality wasn’t already being speculated on, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I felt a cheek-reddening, stomach-knotting kind of euphoria whenever Oliver’s eyes would catch mine over the throngs of people, each of us with a slightly different group of friends - a natural segmentation of the college-aged and the non-college-aged that reminded me of the unspoken disparity between us. I’d watch him across the room with a possessiveness that startled even myself in its intensity, and one night, after stumbling through the doors of our respective bedrooms to meet on our shared balcony (a guise that was fooling nobody) Oliver scolded me for it.

“I can’t help it,” I sighed in apology, letting my body fall into his the second we were alone. “You’re just too nice to look at.”

“You’ll give us away,” he warned quietly, fingers finding the hem of my shirt.

“Don’t be silly. Nobody’s watching.”

I brushed his comment aside as trivial, unaware that Oliver’s caution came from the fact he had been privy to some unpleasant discourse on my sexual persuasion, and no doubt didn’t want my lustful gazes to lead them onwards to him. It was the first time I sensed Oliver’s unease with what we were doing - the first time he placed any legitimacy on the shame I felt whenever I dwelled on it all for too long. I was too naive to see that it pointed to a larger, more brooding worriment inside my lover that would eventually become his downfall.

Oliver’s anxiety temporarily thawed as he collected me in his arms, letting me brace myself on his broad shoulders to wrap both legs awkwardly around his waist. I was not graceful sober and I was less so drunk. He laughed at my clumsiness and carried me into the safety of his bedroom, mouthing at my neck and worshiping my jawline with his tongue, his broad hands all over me.

Having sex that drunk was always a mess. The combination of Oliver’s huge body and my easily tangled, gangly limbs would result in shushed giggles and sloppy, rushed foreplay. It usually ended with me on top, curled up on his chest as if I were asleep, legs spread and knees planted on either side of him as he pressed into me with slow, unhurried rolls of his hips that only sometimes culminated in an orgasm for either of us - the importance of the exercise only that we were connected.

In my diary the next day, I would describe it as _the kind of lovemaking that could run rings around time_.

 

*******

 

When Oliver asked me about my time in New York on his balcony the night before, I was apprehensive to do so. Not because of Sébastien or any of the circumstances surrounding him, but because I was fearful of Oliver’s judgements on my character. There was twenty whole years between the man I was now and the man I was then, and I didn’t want him to view me as anything other than the person he had once known. That was where our memory resided: preserved in that version of me, innocent and pure, unblemished by all the things that followed. But now, perhaps because I was drunk, or perhaps because I was realising the only person Oliver was interested in judging was himself, I spoke fluidly and freely.

“You know, it’s fascinating that you chose to go to NYU for your undergrad,” Oliver mused, sagging back into his seat with the relaxed bones of one thoroughly soused.

“Why?” I quizzed, squeezing the lime into my _margarita invernale_ , sucking on the juice left on my fingertips. “Because it isn’t part of your precious Ivy League?”

“No, I just meant --”

“I didn’t want to be surrounded by social elitism for my entire education.” I cut in before he could give some lame reason for why he disapproved of my choice in college. “My parents’ decision to raise me mostly in Italy was to shield me from being caught up in that obnoxious academic bubble. I wanted college to be an experience that exposed me to more than just redbricks or nauseating fraternities. I wanted something more interesting than that.”

“Oh I see. You wanted to find the _cool_ guys. The artists, the musicians, the writers...”

“No,” I lied, pursing my lips into a smile. “I wanted to find the guys who would fuck me.”

His eyes widened for a second before softening into a laugh. “Interesting choice, then. The Ivy Leagues are full of unfulfilled sexual tension between boys. Trust me.”

I scoffed. “I wasn’t interested in overgrown private school boys trying to hide their shame between my legs. I just wanted to find people like me.”

“Right. And did you?”

“Are you asking me if I found guys like me or guys who would fuck me?” I raised an eyebrow.

I was feeling impetuous and a little smug, encouraged by the alcohol blooming in my blood and the feeling that here, on my turf, I had an advantage that gave me sovereignty of the situation. Was Oliver thinking about all the men who had shared my bed and shared my body in ways that he could only fantasise about revisiting? Cruelly, I hoped he was.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt you found guys who would fuck you. I think even the straightest of men would consider it.”

“Well, I’ve had more than my fair share of _straight men_ trying to fuck their confusion away, thank you very much.”

There was a pause, his eyes searching me carefully as if hoping he could get the answer to a question without having to actually speak it.

“Do you place _me_ in that category?” Oliver asked slowly, the timbre of his voice lowering a notch.

My eyebrows twitched upwards and I offered him a serious, careful look. A look that told him to turn his question inwards.

“Should I?”

He paused for longer than I expected, before declaring with a strange amount of displaced confidence, but absolutely no conviction: “I’m not gay.”

It was the most unconvincing thing I had ever heard in my life, his inflection sounding more like an argument than a statement, a question mark floating around that shouldn’t be there.

“No?” I dared to question as we stared unflinching at each other.

“No.”

“But you’re not straight, are you?”

“No?”

“No.” I said it with some authority, the silly little back-and-forth of our _tête-à-tête_ coming to an end.

“And what makes you qualified to make that assumption?” Oliver sneered, straightening his posture and squaring his shoulders..

“Oh, I don’t know.” I leaned forward, tapped my fingers on the table smugly. “Maybe the fact that I’ve had your cock in my ass more times than I could even remember?”

It was a little brash for me, and my sudden salaciousness didn’t sit well with my drinking buddy. It seemed to hit him with force, a reminder of exactly what we had shared during those six weeks together. A reminder that - no matter how he spun it in his mind - three of those six weeks were spent fucking each others brains out. We may be close to strangers now, in the view of anyone else, but I knew what it was like to watch Oliver peak. I knew what it was like to have him inside me in every way that was possible. I knew every secret his body held because he had let it all out night after night between my legs.

Oliver practically snarled at my words, his upper lip twitching with an internal acrimony I knew he would never speak. As he inhaled slowly through his nose to calm down the reaction inside him, I saw a twitch in his chin that reminded me of a child. I considered then that perhaps I was out of order, but the moment was only fleeting - washed away with my intoxication.

“And does that automatically make me gay?” he asked, voice thick with chagrin.

“Not necessarily. But most of the straight men I know don’t tend to fuck other men,” I slumped back in my seat, bringing my glass to my lips. “But then, what do I know?”

I thought my goading might bring out a nastiness in him, or at least a drunken irritation that would provoke him into some kind of discourse on the matter. It’s not that I wanted an argument with him, and I certainly didn’t want to intentionally hurt his feelings, but I found it hard to tiptoe around the issue when it seemed to be swallowing up every moment we had together.

But he didn’t bite. In fact, he withdrew. As if he was finally yielding, ready to wave the white flag and surrender to my arrogant onset.

“I wish it was all as simple as you make it sound, Elio.”

“It _is_ simple, if you allow it to be,” I insisted.

He just shook his head, leaning it back against the cushion of the booth and letting his eyes fall closed. He looked tired, like he was about to call an end to the night and send me on my way. His lips were stained a deep red from all the alcohol, his cheeks flushed a gentle pink. He really was beautiful, even in this state of disrepair.

“Why are we here, Oliver?” I asked suddenly. My blunt gambit got his full attention.

“What do you mean?”

“Why am I here? Why did you ask me to come?”

He looked totally blindsided by my question. “I… I don’t know. I just wanted to see you, I guess.”

“Well here I am.” I raised both hands in the air. “So what now?”

He didn’t say anything - just let his lips part and close repeatedly as he struggled to find an answer. I pushed on in the face of his fluster.

“Something clearly triggered you to send that email and invite me here. It’s not like you’ve had no conceivable way of contacting me before. So why now? Because of your divorce? Because of my mother? Because your sons are practically adults? You tried to put the onus on me to break that silence, as if I had been withholding from you, but you know there hasn’t been a day since you left that I wouldn’t have been pleased to hear from you.”

“I invited you to my home, Elio. You declined.” He was talking now about my unexpected visit to New England five years ago, where I turned down the offer of dinner with his family.

I scoffed audibly, rolling the whites of my eyes. “That’s different.”

“How is it different? You’ve had as much opportunity to reach out over the years as I have.”

“You left _me_ , Oliver,” I said more forcefully than both of us expected. “You could have waited for me until all those barriers that stood in our way were gone. But you chose not to - that was your prerogative and your choice to make. I don’t hold it against you. But you don’t get to walk away from someone who wanted you to stay, and then expect them to be the one to close the distance. I had no right to seek you, to reach out to you. You were getting married, starting a family. There was no place for me. I respected your choice and stayed away until enough time had passed. If you wanted something different the ball was in your court.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say. You know why I stayed away.”

“Try starting with the truth for once? You’ve clearly hit a roadblock you can’t get over. All closeted men do eventually. But I’m curious where I fit into all of this? Why it’s me you’re using as a sounding board for your neurosis when you barely know me at all anymore? Are you trying to put your demons to bed by coming and sticking your fingers in wounds I’ve already dealt with? Or are you just here for a quick fuck to see if you still like it?”

“I already know I still fucking like it!” he snapped through clenched teeth, voice a hiss and body arching over the edge of the table towards me. His mouth was pressed into a thin line, eyebrows low and eyes piercing as he spoke perhaps the most honest words of the night.

“I bet. Do you have to pay for it? Or are the boys in New England willing to indulge you for free?”

I wasn’t sure where that indignity came from - it just surged out of my mouth like vomit. He stared at me long enough for the air between us to turn cold, as if someone had opened a window and let the outside billow in between us. I clenched my jaw, trying to anticipate his next move, but his eyes never changed from intense to angry. They just drifted away from mine disappointingly and fixated back on his empty glass. I chose to stay quiet, knowing I had already said more than enough.

“I need a smoke,” he said eventually, snatching up his jacket and rising from his seat. It sounded like a modern version of _Later!_ \- his new _esco_ . That’s what _Later!_ meant, after all. It wasn’t casual or dismissive. It wasn’t cool or collected. It was fear and awkwardness. It was: _the longer I sit here, the more I’m forced to acknowledge something that makes me uncomfortable._

I watched as he disappeared through the throngs of people and out through the door, throwing his jacket over his shoulders like a disgraced knight reclaiming his cape, a cigarette already between his lips. I stayed where I was, standing my ground as director of my own reactions. I gave Oliver the time it took me to finish my drink and settle our tab before I followed him outside.

 

*******

 

I found him all the way down on _Piazza Navona,_ directly in front of the Fountain of Neptune. I hesitated to approach him, hanging back on the corner as I lit a cigarette and observed him for a few moments from a distance. He appeared frozen in front of the illuminated verdigris water, posture tall and imposing despite how small he looked from afar. Even here, like this, he was somehow a picture of strength, of authority, of virility; an adonis gilded in the piazza’s yellowed lights. I envied and loathed and adored him all at once; a myriad of conflicting feelings directed towards the figuration of a man I had erased from my active consciousness a long time ago.

When I did finally approach him, intentionally scuffing my shoes on the cobblestones loudly enough for him to hear, he acknowledged me only by a slight turn of his chin. He was staring into the water with a perfunctory scowl, one hand tucked into his armpit, the other hanging down, cigarette limp between his fingers.

“The king of the seas weeps too, old helpless man,” I recited. It was such an _Elio_ way to break the ice.

“Sorry?”

“It’s a poem. Stephen Crane?”

“Oh.” He wasn’t enamoured _or_ amused. Check.

“Not the moment, I guess.” I looked down at my feet, rubbing my palm over the back of my neck awkwardly. “Look. I’m sorry for what I said in there. I was out of order.”

A lengthy breath of nicotine snaked out from between his lips. “It’s fine. You’re just saying the truth. It’s about time I did the same.”

“I don’t know. Truth is relative. And we’re both pretty drunk.”

“Speak for yourself. I have an iron stomach these days. I could drink a liquor store dry and walk out without a twitch.”

I didn’t know if his hyperbole was meant to impress me or not, so I chose not to reply. He pulled another breath from his cigarette before stepping forward to get a better look at Neptune’s statuette form bursting valiantly from the centre of the fountain. He was naked and fighting an octopus between his legs.

“I heard Neptune was an asshole,” Oliver said.

“That figures,” I replied, gesturing to his crotch with my cigarette. “He has a tiny dick.”

My joke made Oliver laugh, and the smiles we exchanged served as a truce for our prior conflict. When he turned to walk towards the concrete bench behind me, he ran the tips of his fingers along the length of my arm to indicate I should follow him. I did as asked, sitting down beside him as we said nothing - both of us just breathing mouthfuls of smoke up towards the clear night sky until our cigarettes were dead, neither moving to light another - a clear indicator that we both had something to say.

“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?” Oliver eventually said.

I nodded, smiling at the memory. “We have. It’s where we sang until dawn with whatever meanderers cared to join us. One of the best nights of my life.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Oliver corrected. “I meant we’ve been _here_ before. Walking this line. Both of us not sure of what to say, or how to act, or how much of ourselves to reveal. Dancing around that elephant that’s been tagging along all night”

“That’s because you’re afraid and I’m unsure,” I pointed out.

“What are you unsure about?”

“Who you are,” I admitted, looking him dead in the eyes before asking him: “What are you afraid of?”

“The same thing,” he said earnestly, voice quiet and timid.

I sat still for a while, letting Oliver’s words settle in my bones before reaching across the short distance to rest my hand just above his knee. I squeezed, gently, reassuringly, silently, and his hand came to rest on top of mine as if it was drawn there by a force.

“I just wanted to see you, Elio,” he said, answering my earlier question. “I’ve seen your face twice in as many decades. It’s not enough.”

“I know,” I exhaled.

I didn’t know what else to say to him. These things were just facts. Sad facts of the lives we had chosen to live completely apart from one another. I looked down at our hands resting against each other and turned mine so that my palm was facing upwards. Oliver took the hint, and as if charged by muscle memory, linked them together into a tight clasp. I squeezed my fingers around his reassuringly.

“I um -- I had an affair with an ex-student last year. He came to me for some advice on something he was writing and… it just kind of happened.”

I nodded. At this point, our foray into Oliver’s discontent had given me no reason to be surprised at such a revelation. He was a textbook paramour case. Another man to add to the list of those who could not keep their desires contained inside their lies any longer, else they might implode. From my experience, these cases almost always ended with adultery of some kind. I had been caught up in such situations myself, though my involvement was always on the opposite side to Oliver’s.

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, blinking through the pause that stretched between us.

“Does --”

“Eleanor doesn’t know. The college don’t know.”

“They don’t need to know. But Eleanor, she --” He cut me off again.

“Please, Elio. I really don’t need a lecture from you. I’ve berated myself enough over it already.”

“I’m not trying to lecture you,” I assured him. “You think I haven’t done things I regret? But ask yourself this - are you more ashamed that you did it, or that you wanted it?”

He looked at me and tutted. “I think you already know the answer to that.”

“You can’t pile shame upon shame. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t kill fire with more fire, Oliver. At some point you’ll burn everything.”

“Ha. You sound so much like your father sometimes.”

“He would have something much better to say to you, I’m sure.”

Oliver smiled at that, scrubbing at his face with his palms. “He really was like a father to me in many ways. I always wondered why he was so generous with me after I left. I didn’t do much to deserve it.”

“He saw a lot of himself in you...” I reasoned.

“I don’t believe that.”

We fell silent for a moment as Oliver sat with my words. I saw him looking at me, as if urging me to speak further. As if he could sense there was more to come, like he could sense all those years ago that I wasn’t finished throwing up in front of the Pasquino just a few steps away from us. I yielded to his unspoken trust.

“After you left we had a conversation. A _cuore a cuore_ my mother would have called it. Everything I have ever needed to deal with suffering was given to me that day by him. He was incredible with words. With empathy. With love - inwardly and outwardly. But he was not immune to pain. He lived his whole life not quite the person he felt he was.”

“I don’t understand,” Oliver gaped. “Was he not happy with your mother?”

“Oh he was very happy with her. Could you not tell? They were made for one another. But he had been led to her through a life of restraint. A nice reward, sure. But it doesn’t make up for the feeling of inauthenticity. The feeling of a life you missed by seconds. You must understand that feeling, right?”

“Yes. But --”

“You think the 80’s were tough for men who desired other men? I can’t imagine what the 50’s would have been like, can you?”

My words hit him square in the chest and I watched their meaning bounce across his features. A multitude of emotions seemed to burst within him at once, simmering down into a look of bewilderment.

“No -- I -- No. I had no idea. Wow.”

“He was a very private man despite his candid character. But Oliver? It would break his heart to see you like this. To see you make the same crushing judgements on yourself. My father died a happy man because of my mother’s unfaltering love. Because of a beautiful life they were able to build together. But he was lucky. He understood how easily the coin could have fallen the other way.”

“I think…” he paused, his breath hitching in his throat. It was the closest to maudlin I had ever seen him. “I think my coin has fallen the other way.”

“Maybe.” I wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know how things are for you at home with your family. I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to reconcile all of that after so many years, the enormity of it in your mind. But you’re not an old man just yet. There’s still plenty of time to be happy, in whatever form that takes for you.”

“Have _you_ been happy?” he asked me.

I hesitated for a beat, wondering what difference that made, before nodding. “Yes, I have. With much sadness too, of course. But I have experienced great moments of happiness that make up for any of that. You, perhaps, were the greatest.”

He seemed surprised and unsurprised all at once, and I understood that state of emotional contradiction all too well.

“Even in its brevity?” he asked.

“I appreciate brevity. Some of the best poems of all time are also the shortest.”

He was looking at me now with the intoxicated, ethereally heavy longing of somebody desperate to make a move; somebody desperate to kiss me. I could feel it in myself too, tugging at my chest to close the distance between us. We were thigh-to-thigh, nothing between us but clothing, and doubt, and years of orbit. I wanted desperately to reach out for him, to touch his face, his hair, his mouth, the curve of his chin that was crying out for my lips. I wanted to show him how sincere I was, how the things I had said weren't just lip-service to our memoirs.

But I couldn’t. Because I had promised myself long ago - in an abstract sense that I never thought I would need to draw upon - that I would not be the first to cross that invisible tripwire. If he wanted it, he had to ask for it.

I saw the battle come to a head on his face, reflecting the most vulnerable parts of himself in the moonlight that was flooding our scene. I watched in slow-motion as he reached up to cup my cheek. His long fingers pushed behind my ear and into the curls that sat there. The touch rendered me useless, my lips parting and my eyelids fluttering closed. I knew by the way my heart hammered against my ribcage that my resolve was dangerously close to breaking. He must have sensed it too.

“Can I kiss you?”

He whispered the question to me and bowed slightly to press his forehead against mine. His fingers trailed slowly down the contour of my neck, bringing goosebumps out along the skin and allowing his thumb access to my mouth. He trailed it softly over my lower lip, eliciting the tiniest of exhales from my lungs.

“No,” I replied simply, but made no move to pull away from him.

“Why not?”

We were so close that I could feel his breath ghosting over my skin. The full-bodied scent of his cologne filled my nostrils. He had never worn cologne when I was with him - such things were futile in those sweltering summers - and only ever smelled of the sea or sweat or the musky scent of our bed after sex. He had a scent I would have recognised anywhere, but it was masked now in more ways than one. His new, heady smell - virile and alluring like the marketers of whatever brand he was wearing no doubt hoped for - was enticing me away from my internal steadfast commitment not to touch him. My stomach churned with emotional motion sickness as I fought against the devil on my shoulder, my heart tugging and twisting against my chest like an animal trying to escape.

_Just kiss him you idiot!_

“I don’t think I can stop at a kiss,” I admitted breathlessly, to Oliver, but also to that devil.

“What if I don’t want you to?”

“You don’t know what you want, Oliver.”

“Then help me figure it out. _Please_.”

And just like that, with one pleading request from an old lover in our ghost spot, my willpower evaporated. It was hardly surprising - any pretence of control was nothing but a mirage after all. Whether he knew it or not, Oliver held all of the power to undo me, and my resolve shattered like porcelain on concrete.

I crashed my lips against his almost menacingly, my fists grasping at the lapels of his jacket with urgency. Every song that was a hit that summer rushed back into my consciousness like a wave of seawater crashing against the cliffs. Every piece of music I learned to play on the piano. Every book I read at the berm. Everything that lived in those six weeks re-materialised like a resurrection in my mind. The sun, the food, the bikes, _the love._

If we were in one of those old movies, _Piazza Navona_ and the crisp Rome night surrounding us would collapse like a cardboard box, revealing us to be sat on top of a rock - Oliver’s rock - amidst a muggy August night just steps from the villa where both my parents were sleeping soundly. We’d look up at the stars, dangle our feet in the water, kiss until we were breathless, and say to the reflection of the moon: _it’s good to be home._

I inhaled raggedly through my nose as I deepened my assault on his mouth, pressing my tongue to his his lower lip and tasting the residual bitterness of cigarettes and rum that grounded me back in reality. Blood rushed loudly in my ears as a warning. The hollow thump of my pulse beat aggressively in my throat. A fusion of adrenaline and endorphins emanated from my blood and out to each of my limbs, leaving me trembling as I scrambled for composure.

Despite asking for it, Oliver seemed momentarily surprised at my charge and had to grasp onto my hips to stay upright on the bench. He tugged me closer when he sensed my hunger, but there was no distance left for us to close. The tripwire was well and truly triggered.

I tore my mouth from his before I kissed us unconscious, gasping for air. He held my head steady in his hands and stared straight into my eyes; straight into my goddamn soul where nobody had looked for the longest time. I blinked and saw his face blur, my eyes filling hot with tears that I silently begged not to fall.

And then he kissed me once more. The kind of kiss that brings people back to life. A small, gentle, loving press of his lips to mine that settled the frantic beat of my heart.

This was home. _He_ was home.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> P.S Extra points for your Hogwarts house if you spotted the following:
> 
> \- A direct quote from the novel  
> \- A direct quote from Armie  
> \- A direct quote from Timmy (this one should be easy!)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you all for your kind words and lovely comments. And thank you for continuing to be patient with me! This chapter is a bit of a rollercoaster and a little longer than usual, but keep in mind that there IS one final instalment to go!
> 
> Hope you enjoy! Please comment and let me know your thoughts... I reply to every single one of you :)

It’s never pretty when a heart breaks. It’s even uglier when two hearts shatter at the same time. Oliver and I were the living embodiment of such ugliness. Our hearts had coalesced into one during our six weeks together, so trying to rebuild two from the debris seemed near impossible. Oliver, it appeared, patched himself up haphazardly, stuffing his chest with whatever he could find to fill the space and keep on going. As little fuss as possible - that was the manly way. Naturally, my approach was much more sensitive. I picked up each piece and welded everything back together slowly and carefully, tending to my wounds with sympathy and patience until my heart was as close to whole as it once was.

But in the chaos of our fallout not all of the pieces of our hearts made their way back home - some of them ended up patched into the wrong person altogether. Oliver took a part of me with him when he left Italy, jammed carelessly inside his quick-fix heart and buried deep in the mess he considered dealt with. And for better or for worse, intentional or not, my father was right in his letter - Oliver _did_ leave a part of his heart lodged inside me. Sewn into me like that badge of honour I had worn so proudly in my younger years. And whilst it brought me comfort in many ways, in others it was a burden I didn’t always wish to carry.

Oliver’s impact on my life was not something I vocalised to many. My parents knew what they knew and anything they didn’t know didn’t matter. Sébastien was the first person to get the whole apologue from start to finish with no details missed out. He was completely enchanted by the whole thing and his reaction was a turning point in the way I viewed our affair: as something beautiful and lasting, not broken and fleeting. So much of me was made from what I learned from Oliver that I could never be truly resentful for any of it, and yet the impact of such a souvenir swung both ways - he cut the path for most of my flaws and insecurities, and it took someone like Sébastien to love me _because_ of them to remind me that I was not just a product of that summer, or of Oliver, but a product of everything and everyone I had ever loved or would go on to.

But Sébastien held a focus on Oliver more strongly than I expected. Perhaps it is the burden of the dying to become obsessed with moving along those they love so that the impact of their fatality doesn’t reach quite so far. He was convinced that I would reunite with Oliver someday - that our connection would somehow be restored in a burst of unexpected light. But I think he was just captivated by the cinematic romance of it all; the idea that two hearts might be forever connected. Maybe it was his way of telling me that _our_ hearts would be connected forever as well. He was a romantic after all, as was I, but he knew better than anybody that the past should stay firmly where it belonged - in the past. The benefit of being the one who dies is that you don’t have to worry about any of that, so I allowed him whatever fantasy he needed to see him through.

When he passed away in the spring of ‘93, I was in no rush to replace him and certainly in no rush to settle down. I lived my Roman recalescence and then moved to Oxford where I would stay for the next decade - both as student and teacher. My work quickly became my companion and my comfort. I adored teaching and I adored England. And yes, eventually, I found men to share my bed for more than a night. But nothing really stuck. I never had time to fully to commit to somebody, or at least that’s what I told myself. There were no Sébastien’s. No Oliver’s. My house stayed my house; my things, my books, my piano. And I was okay with that; independent, busy, proud, fulfilled. Loved without the need for a lover.

That was, until my father died.

Death isn’t something you can ever make sense of. You feel the grief in all of its inexplicable aggression forever. It settles into every crevice of your soul, makes itself at home, and never moves out. Sébastien’s death was like a practice run for my father’s, which was sudden and unexpected, bringing a new kind of anger and helplessness to navigate. I never felt more alone than I did in the days that followed. It was as if a valley had opened up between me and the world, every modicum of pain I was holding onto expanding until I was saturated with sorrow. There was nobody there to console or hold me as I weathered the storm, and my poor mother’s grief was drowning her in ways I didn’t know how to save her from.

I think grief is a singular wound. The more times it opens the harder it becomes to close. I was unlucky to lose a lover before a parent. I was unlucky to lose a parent long before his time should have been up. Despite their differences my grief began to run in tandem - Sébastien’s and my father’s - becoming almost suffocating in size. In the absence of anybody else tangible, I began to long for _Oliver_. It’s what drove me to New England on that hazy September afternoon following fifteen years of near silence. I yearned to see him - to experience his physical presence. If just to remind myself that there was a man who once loved me still above earth.

Perhaps all of this started then, when I walked into his Harvard lecture theatre with my unkempt beard and my empty chest. Perhaps that is when our real story began; when I crossed the tripwire, broke the silence, closed the distance between us and awakened something inside Oliver that had lay dormant and quiet for years - the tiny piece of my heart that he still owned.

 _Cor cordium_. Heart of hearts. The epitaph that Oliver had appropriated and immortalised on my postcard never made more sense.

 

*******

 

We kissed on that bench in _Piazza Navona_ for a little while longer. Sweet, exploratory kisses pressed out through tentative smiles that probably seemed to passers by like two men on their first date. Eventually, remembering the imprint of each others lips was not enough for either of us, and there was a moment of heady impasse where we locked gazes - both of us unsure whether there was another level to the night available to us. There was, of course. The _opportunity_ was there, the _want_ was there. The question was just whether we dared ascend to it.

I stared into him, his tantalising sea-foam eyes doing nothing to quell the desire I was still desperately trying to grasp the reigns of. Sensing that Oliver seemed incapable of making a decision, I made it for us. Just like the moment I pushed my note under his door, I took charge of the nights narrative whilst simultaneously surrendering myself to him.

“Take me to your hotel before I change my mind,” I whispered, and let him lead the way.

His body was exactly as I had left it. Broad shoulders, taut muscles, sensually smooth skin that stretched on for days. I wanted to take in every part of him through absorption. I had idolised so much of him from a distance when I was younger, aching for a forbidden glimpse of any part of him that did not reach the sun each day. Every touch, no matter how small or thoughtless on his part, fuelled my wonder and gussied up the vigour in which I desired him. All of a sudden I felt like that boy again, exploring him for the first time and feeling such an excitement within me that I thought I might spill over.

I could not hold back my frenzied desire, and was relieved to see it matched equally by Oliver’s. Each item of clothing we removed was a step towards a freedom we were both seeking. There was a wooziness to my actions, my limbs lagging, not quite moving how I expected. It gave off the impression I was fumbling or nervous and I envied Oliver’s predictable composure, who was tugging at my leather belt like it’s undoing was integral to his survival. I could scarcely believe we were there, in his slightly-too-warm hotel room, clothes dropping one-by-one onto the deep pile carpet. If I thought about what was happening for too long my body felt transposed and dazed, so I kept my mind in the shallow waters of exactly what I was experiencing. _Don’t think, just feel,_ I thought, which was easy to do with so much alcohol in my system.

Despite the initial fumbling I took charge of our bodies, sitting him down on the edge of the bed and crawling onto his lap. I spread my legs over his sturdy thighs with ease. I had been there before after all, and my body settled effortless against his like memory foam that had never re-expanded.

“This is new,” Oliver practically purred, twisting his neck so that he could kiss the smattering of dark hair peppered across my sternum. I giggled like the boy I no longer was and arched my chest into the onrush of affection.

“Yeah, I hit puberty after you left,” I teased.

“Don’t say that,” Oliver scolded me playfully, smacking his hand lightly against the swell of my ass. If his intention was to make me moan, it worked. And unless Oliver was an actual pederast, I would say my body was even more attractive to him now - svelte and complete in ways it couldn’t have been before.

Finding courage in the alcohol still firing at speed through my veins, I pushed Oliver back by his shoulders so that he was flat against the sheets below me. I smirked at him as I pushed my hands up his chest, revelling in the familiarity of his almost entirely unchanged body. I trailed my lips all the way from his navel up to his lips, where I eagerly pushed my tongue into his mouth.

We kissed like that for what felt like hours. Oliver’s hands remapped every inch of me that he could reach - from the tips of my ears to the back of my calves. When he inevitably ran out of skin to claim he snuck a finger down into the cleft of my ass and caressed me there in a hint that was less than subtle. _Am I offending you?_ he might have asked if I hadn’t stolen the breath from his lungs immediately. I moaned into his mouth, pressing the scorching heat of my cock against him to answer his unspoken question. I felt Oliver reach between our thighs and I keened against the rough stubble of his throat - my arousal coiling tighter and tighter in the base of my pelvis with every passing second.

I bit down on Oliver’s lip until I tasted blood. I couldn’t help the urge. We were too old for love bites - I didn’t care to mark him - but I did want him to feel something carnal. I would never have bitten him before, I was sweet and passive in almost all of our sexual encounters, but now I wanted to remind him I was no longer so innocent and wet behind the ears. The assault made him gasp, and when I pulled back to sit up on my knees, he looked perfectly debauched under my charge.

“Do you have a condom?” I asked.

Oliver pushed his hands up the pale incline of my thighs. “No. I wasn’t exactly expecting this to happen.” He managed a small laugh between the shallow pants he was attempting to regulate. “Do you?”

“I’m 37. I'm afraid I don’t carry condoms in my back pocket anymore.”

“It’s okay. I’m clean,” Oliver assured me with a confident roll of his hips, his cock now upright against my ass and desperate for more attention than I was allowing it.

I laughed against his skin, trailing my lips back up to the pulse point in his neck. I scraped my teeth over the skin there, remembering how he had liked that in the heat of our summer passion. The shiver it elicited from his body told me that not much had changed.

“Sorry,” I said unapologetically, “I don’t fuck bareback.”

“No?” Oliver asked, his voice already a frustrated growl as he bucked his hips impatiently. The slick movement of his cock against my behind was filthy and thrilling, and I had never wanted anything more than to yield to our shared desires. “It never bothered you before.”

“Yeah, well. That was _before_.”

“Do you not trust me?”

I sighed, pulling back again. I pressed my hand over his heart and let it beat raggedly against my palm. I gave him a sobered look - though I was anything but sober.

“Trust doesn’t count for anything, Oliver. I don’t fuck anyone without protection. Ever. Not even you.”

His hand stroked tenderly up my side, his thumb grazing over the sharp jut of my hip bone. “ _Not even me_ ,” he repeated with a small smile. “I think there’s a compliment in there somewhere.”

I leaned down to kiss his mouth again, pillowing my lips so that he could feel all of the sweetness I held in them. In one fluid motion Oliver reversed our positions on the bed. I surrendered my body to him immediately, giving him whatever he wanted as long as it didn’t compromise my staunchly self-inflicted rule of no unprotected sex. It was something I would never, ever yield on. Not even when thoroughly undone underneath the man I had dreamed of reclaiming.

 

*******

 

We didn’t keep it sweet for too long. He came in my mouth and I came in his. And once we had recovered from the high, had kissed each other into another luxuriant frenzy, I let him tongue me from behind until I was moaning and panting his name in ways I had only since done alone - shrouded with bitterness. I came over his pillow with tears stinging the corner of my eyes, and then, in a nostalgic ode to our first time, I pressed two skilled fingers deep into his body and let him come over my chest with an uncharacteristically delicate cry of my name. The sound was like a caress to my soul I didn’t know I was craving.

It wasn’t the romantic lovemaking I had expected when he held my body against his in the elevator that evening - every one of my senses sparking as I stared into the bewitching spell of his gaze. And yet, somehow, the way we had let our bodies come together until we were writhing with lust - marking each other with the scent of our sweat and spit and semen - was far more fitting to our reunion than any archetypal penetrative sex could have been.

Oliver cleaned me with the side of his pillow I hadn’t already defiled before tossing it on the floor to worry about later. I fell asleep almost immediately in the circle of his arms, supple and weak in his embrace as I remained wilfully ignorant to exactly what we had just done to our already fragile reconciliation.

 

*******

 

Oliver was not there when I woke up. Nor was there an imprint or heat that proved he ever was. It occurred to me, in the brief moments before becoming entirely conscious, that the whole evening could have been a dream. I was good at sensationalising things after all, and such a fantasy was well within my remit.

As I moved to sit up the roar of my hangover deafened me. All of the favourable effects of last night's alcohol had disappeared, leaving me only with the unpleasant: dry mouth, aching muscles, a crack of pain right in the middle of my brow. The poisoned blood coming back to life within my body felt as though it was being pushed through the tiniest passages, the whooshing sound of tinnitus in my ears unnerving as I tried to focus on the room in front of me. Unless I had checked myself into Oliver’s hotel last night and masturbated more furiously than I had in years, I was pretty sure none of it had been a dream. A wave of clarity hit me like a tsunami, my body unable to find the strength to stay upright.

I was still naked under the covers, the sheets warm and forgiving on my body. Just as I thought I might go back to sleep, my stomach gargled acidicly and the back of my mouth swelled with saliva. The warning from my body was unmistakable. I shot out of bed, pulled on my underwear, and made it to the toilet just in time, regurgitating last night’s food and drink until the only thing coming up was a revolting mixture of bile and spit. I felt momentarily relieved, my body levelling for a note until the nausea returned with no way to diminish it - my stomach empty of all possible export.

I sighed, scraping my hands over my face as I stared at my ghoulish reflection in the mirror, thinking back over the night Oliver and I had just shared. My head continued to throb mercilessly. Feedback rang in my ears like a badly patched PA system. Every move caused a spike of pain in the very centre of my temples, and mixed with the whirlpool of remorse and the shiver of anxiousness that was creeping up the back of my spine, I felt as if I was rotting from the inside. It was then that I spotted Oliver’s brown leather wash bag next to the sink, the zipper open and his toothbrush sticking out. Perhaps he had some aspirin in there I could swipe? That would at least take off the edge.

To my dismay I didn’t find any aspirin, or any painkillers for that matter. What I did find, however, was a half-full bottle of Zoloft. Zoloft was a trade name for the antidepressant Sertraline. I knew this not just because it was written in small text underneath, but because my mother had been prescribed the exact same thing last year when her anxiety had reached an unmanageable level.

I looked down at the bottle in my hand, turning it over curiously until I was faced with the prescription sticker. It read Oliver’s full name and address: _Dr._ _Oliver H. - 15 Pinewood Crescent, Lexington, MA._

I suddenly felt a crushing distance from him and his life. I imagined his house, set back on a luscious green suburban lot, long driveway, double garage with basketball hoop, perfectly painted shutters framing every window, bright red front door with potted flowers blooming either side, a welcome mat that his wife keeps clean on the porch only for their boys to muddy it up with their football boots. The real American dream.

But then I remembered the divorce and considered that Pinewood Crescent might be his new address. An apartment probably. Or a townhouse. With just enough room for him and his things, with space for the boys to stay. I had no idea really. He hadn’t spoken about anything regarding his living situation, and I hadn’t cared enough to ask.

But now I had so many questions I could hardly contain myself. Was Oliver depressed? Anxious? Both? Is that why he had an affair? Why he was divorcing his wife? Why he invited me here in the first place? Was he really so sad, so utterly miserable with the life that he never seemed to want in the first place, that he needed medication to pull himself out of such a state? My heart ached more than I thought it should - deep in my chest, the ventricles contracting as if the pain was my own.

I remembered waking up in bed earlier that morning - when the darkness outside was just beginning to ease. It was only a brief moment of lucidity, where the heaviness of the evening’s consumption was merely a precursory throb in my bones. Oliver was fast asleep beside me, unperturbed by my awakening, one arm tucked underneath the pillow that cradled his head, the other weightlessly draped over my lower back. I chanced a kiss to the corner of his mouth, let my fingers trail along the graceful slope of his neck. His features were so relaxed that I barely believed he was the same man I had spent the last 48 hours with. The same man who was so guarded, so full of inner conflict, so tightly wound in every way. I stared at him in wonderment, enjoying the purity of someone temporarily free from all of their worldly troubles, until my eyes succumbed to sleep again.

It occurred to me now - holding his almost empty bottle of pills in my hand - that the sanctuary of sleep might be the only time Oliver doesn’t feel broken. When his brain can slow to a gentle whirr and he doesn’t have to hold up the weight of his crumbling facade. I wondered how much the Zoloft helped - if he would be unrecognisable without it now or if all it did was skim off the edges.

“Looking for something?”

Oliver’s deep voice cut through the silence of the bathroom and reverberated off the tiles into my ears. The sound took me by surprise and I flinched, dropping the bottle into the sink with a loud rattle that embarrassed my cheeks.

“Sorry I -- I was just --” I scrambled for my words and for the bottle, shoving it back into his wash bag with zero subtlety or grace. “I was just looking for some painkillers.”

I dared to look up at Oliver in the reflection of the mirror. He was stood in the doorway dressed in running shorts and a grey Harvard t-shirt darkened with sweat all the way down to his nipples. His own cheeks were kissed an endearing pink.

“I didn’t know where you were and -- “

“I went for a run,” he told me simply, expression unreadable. I watched as he turned and walked back into the bedroom with long strides, reappearing quickly with a packet of Advil capsules that he placed carefully next to the sink.

“Thank you,” I said gingerly, looking up at him through my lashes.

“You look a little worse for wear.”

“I’ve felt better,” I smiled wryly.

I popped two of the tablets into my hand before turning on the faucet and leaning forward to wash them down with a mouthful of water. When I stood back up, Oliver was right behind me, his hips crowding mine against the skink. Had it been a few hours earlier I would have found the scent of his sweat and the clamminess of his skin against mine enticing, but this morning it made my stomach churn for a million different reasons. I didn’t push him away, but I didn’t exactly respond to his advance in kind either.

“Hey,” he said softly, reaching to turn me around. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Just hungover.” My words were clipped, lacking any verve.

Oliver wasn’t deterred by my tone. He leaned forward to press his lips to the hollow of my throat. My head lolled back instinctively, exposing my skin and offering myself up to the whims of his mouth. I was disappointed in my body’s lack of loyalty but not surprised. He kissed all the way up until he reached my chin, where he carried on up the curve of my jaw with the most gentle powdering of kisses designed to unravel me.

“Oliver…” I breathed in deeply, trying to quickly convene my thoughts. I squirmed slightly, trying to curl myself out of his hold with as little drama as possible.

“Come on.” I could feel his smirk against my skin, thinking I was playing hard to get. “Get in the shower with me. For old times sake,” he added, reaching between us to cup me through my boxers, squeezing me into the large palm of his hand. I felt electricity shoot up from my thighs and right into my heart, burning me from the inside out.

“Oliver, stop. Please.” I hated how close to a beg my voice was. My tone pushed the desired distance between us.

“Sorry. I just thought…” Oliver trailed off, expression burned as he stepped back.

I had no idea what to say to him, so I just went with a cowardly, “I should go.”

I pushed past him back into the bedroom where I scouted the floor for my clothes. I could feel him watching me as I pulled on my jeans and checked my cell phone. There was no missed calls from home, but the battery was about to die. I gathered up the rest of my clothing, pulling them on and trying to regain a semblance of poise I had lost along the way.

“Are you really going to just leave?” Oliver asked from where he was still stood by the bathroom doorway.

“Am I supposed to stay here forever?”

“Elio.” He said my name compactly, every syllable enunciated precisely as if chastising a petulant child.

“What?”

“Why are you being like this?”

“Like what?” I ask incredulously. ”I have things to do. Don’t you have to get to the University?”

“Not today, no.”

“So, what? You want us to take a shower and then get back into bed together until I need to leave?” I asked, and the look on his face implied I wasn’t too far from the truth. I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Did you buy condoms on your run or something?”

“No? What the hell, Elio.” Oliver looked dumbstruck at my current attitude, which was coming across as inexplicably childish. “Did I do something to upset you?”

I sighed at his tone - it was weary and trembling with the beginnings of upset. I hung my head, shoulders going limp as I pushed a hand into my hair, tugging slightly at the greasy curls tufted at the back of my neck.

“I’m sorry.” I refused to meet his eyes. “This is just -- I just don’t know what to do with this.”

“With what?” Oliver took a tentative step closer to me, as if I was a lamb that could be easily spooked.

“This.” I gestured between us. “Last night.”

“Do you regret it?”

I gave him a pointed look, playing the semantics of the word over in my mind. Of course I didn’t regret it. How could I regret something I had wanted for so long? But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t go back and change it if I could. I was no longer drunk, and therefore no longer blind to the bowl of dejection and slow-burn disappointment I had just served myself.

“Regret isn’t a very useful emotion,” I said, scant and dismissive.

Oliver sighed at my malingering answer, eyes twitching almost into a roll before looking towards the bed we had rendered unchaste together. The sheets were a tangled mess. The pillow covered in a mix of our semen lay disgraced on the floor. I hung my head as shame rose in my throat like the bile that had already run its course. I was ashamed of myself, of Oliver, of us as a dyad for succumbing to our urges. And yet, I did not know the reason for my shame. We were both free to submit ourselves sexually to anyone we pleased.

“Stay for breakfast at least?” Oliver asked, the words coming out almost as a peace offering. “I ordered some for us at the front desk before I came back upstairs.”

I hesitated long enough to make it clear that I wanted to say no, but eventually agreed. I moved onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette whilst Oliver took a quick shower, feeling like a prisoner who had consented to his entrapment and had no desire to try and escape. I hung by the doorway as I watched rain clouds split the morning sunshine in two. The air outside was still and eerie, and, like me, was on the precipice of precipitation.

Breakfast arrived just as I heard Oliver shut the water off. He had ordered us both a cheese and spring onion omelette topped with bacon and a side of grapefruit. Two tall glasses of orange juice, a pot of coffee and a basket of pastries came with it. My stomach rumbled naively at the fulsome array of food and I hoped I could eat at least some of it without making myself sick again.

Oliver joined me fairly soon after, his hair damp and mussed up all over the place in a way that made him look much younger than he was. I poured him his coffee as he sat down, a gesture that warmed us both from the cold encounter that had so far cast a crestfallen spell over our morning. How simple it seemed to be sat with him now, sharing breakfast after a night in each others arms. How reminiscent it felt of B. and all of the mornings we had touched toes under the table as I poured his coffee for him. I felt something expand in my stomach and refused to acknowledge it as anything other than nausea.

We ate mostly in silence. Not comfortable, not uncomfortable. Just silence in its most elemental, as the first choral pattering of rain hit the window beside us. I waited until I had finished scooping out the flesh of my grapefruit before I asked him one of the many questions sitting not-so-patiently on the tip of my tongue.

“What was his name?”

Something immediately shifted in Oliver’s face. I watched his jaw clench as he struggled to suppress the desire to deflect. I could see him mentally cycling through his catalog of masks - deciding what version of the truth to give me. But my expression must have been one that lacked a sense of threat, because quicker than I had ever seen before, his shoulders sagged in a display of defeat.

“Charlie,” he said simply, now far less interested in the croissant he was about to devour.

“How old was he?”

I saw him hesitate, but he offered the information with little resistance. Perhaps because he knew the irony would gratify me. “24.”

“Wow.” I had to laugh. “Well, I suppose I must seem very old in comparison. Were you in love with him?”

“No, I don’t think so. We just...”

“Fucked?”

“No,” he shook his head firmly. “It was more than that. But I don’t think it was love. Maybe I’m just incapable of love these days.”

“Or maybe he’s just a few decades too young for you?”

Oliver wasn’t best pleased with my comment, but I was still wrapped up in my childishness, and now, apparently, jealousy too. I had always taken a selfish kind of comfort in believing that for as long as Oliver was with Eleanor, I was part of a very elite group of men he had loved. Perhaps the only. Charlie, whoever he was - despite Oliver claiming that he _didn’t_ love him - had shattered that illusion somewhat.

“And your wife? Did you love _her_?” I regretted it the second it came out of my mouth. “Sorry,” I apologised quickly. “Just trying to wrap my head around it all.”

“It’s not really your business to wrap your head around. Besides, it’s all in the past.”

“You don’t see him anymore?”

“Charlie? No, he moved to Seattle.”

I nodded, sipping on my coffee. “Would you still be seeing him if he hadn’t?”

“I -- Look. I’m not proud of myself, okay? I’m not proud that I was unfaithful to my wife. But you have no idea about my life, Elio. So don’t sit there and act like you have some moral advantage. I gave 19 years of my life to Eleanor and our family. I put everything I had into it, for the sake of _their_ happiness, and honoured my vows right up until the day Charlie walked back into my office. It was wrong, of course it was, but there’s only so many years of unhappiness a man can take before he fucking breaks and reaches for the first thing that brings relief.”

“Is that why you take Zoloft?” I asked more quickly than I should have.

“What is this? Twenty fucking questions?” There was a levity to his tone that told me my questioning wasn’t entirely unwelcome. There’s always relief in talking about something you keep hidden, even if there’s resistance.

“ _You_ asked me to stay for breakfast,” I pointed out smartly, swiping my tongue across the edge of my thumb that still had the sticky remnants of grapefruit juice on it.

A moment passed before he answered, his voice airy and strange to my ears. “It’s not so uncommon to take antidepressants these days you know.”

“I know. My mother takes the same ones for her anxiety. They’ve helped calm her down a lot.”

“I’m glad,” he nodded sincerely

“Are you really that sad, Oliver?” My question brought the iciness back to the room, but I didn’t regret it.

“Being sad is very different to being depressed. Not that I’m --”

“I know that. I just mean --”

“I’m a mess, okay? The pills take the edge off. Make me feel halfway human. I don’t know what you want me to say about it really,” he suspired.

“I guess I don’t either. Sorry.”

He put his empty cup of coffee down carefully on the table and I felt his eyes rest on me. I pushed the the omelette around my plate, steadfastly avoiding his dissecting gaze. I didn’t have the appetite to eat much really, not whilst my belly was still gargling with this mornings antics. And if I thought my stomach couldn’t take any more, Oliver’s next words would prove me wrong.

“You’re the only person who has ever made me feel whole, Elio.”

I looked up at him, taken back by his sober candidness.

“I’ve never found anything to fill that feeling,” he continued delicately, looking away as if he didn’t dare speak the words to my face. “I made a decision and I had to commit to it. To my wife, to my children. But I’m not strong like you. I didn’t know how to carry those memories without letting them eat me away. I didn’t know how to process that loss without going mad with regret. I had to bury you so deep, somewhere so unreachable, that I lost myself. Because by burying you, I buried myself.”

I didn’t know what to say. Perhaps there was nothing I _could_ say to that. He chanced a look at my reaction, a tiny sweep of his eyes before pushing up from his seat, his full height somewhat unnerving from the low easy-chair I was sat in.

“Come here,” he said, gesturing me up with his hand.

Like a child obeying a parent I rose, deftly side-stepping the table. Oliver reached out to grab a gentle handful of my shirt, letting our chests and lips come together. I was unable to do anything but melt into him, the breath I didn’t know I had been holding in my lungs releasing into Oliver’s mouth.

“I don’t regret last night at all,” he said softly. “Not one bit. I’m trying to make sense of my life. Of who I am without all of this armour, what I want to look like when I take it off. And I know it sounds crazy, Elio… of course it sounds crazy… but I’ve always had this feeling that somehow the answers I’ve been looking for are inside _you._ ”

I thought of our hearts and the tiny pieces of mine I believed to be lodged inside him. I hung my head, feeling my throat tighten like a clamp, barely managing to squeeze my words through the gap.

“Must you cut me open to find them?”

We both stilled, the air around us growing heavy as we looked deep into each others eyes.

“Elio…” he breathed sadly. He said my name so often that I was starting to think he enjoyed the feel of it in his mouth. “That isn’t what I mean to do.”

“But that’s how it feels, Oliver. I appreciate you’re confused but I’m not. I know exactly who I am and how I feel. I don’t want to be some tool you use to figure out whether you want your next relationship to be with a man or a woman.”

My words were trembling dangerously now, tears waiting in the wings to make an appearance. It was also a lie. I didn’t know how I felt at all - especially not in Oliver’s company. He reached up to cup my jaw, ran his thumb over the skin just about breaking with morning stubble.

“When do you go home?” he asked.

“Today. My train leaves at 3.”

I looked up to see what I could have deduced as panic in Oliver’s eyes. He took a long breath, as if trying to soak up some courage from somewhere deep inside.

“Stay with me?” he asked hopefully.

“What?”

“I’m here for another four days. Stay here with me. We could --”

“Oliver, I can’t,” I said quickly, and before he could ask why, “I need to get home to my mother.”

He paused, nodded dejectedly to say he understood. “Can I at least see you off at the station then?”

“What, so we can see it all come full circle?”

“Elio, come on, _please_ ,” his voice was a full-blown beg now. “Don’t be like this. Let’s talk about it. You must -- I -- _God_ \-- Elio, I _know_ you feel it too,” he insisted, reaching out to take my hands in his.

I snapped them both away with a glare aimed straight at his heart.

“Of course I feel it, Oliver!” I cried. “Jesus, can’t you see? That’s the problem here. I don’t want to feel it because where will it get me? The same place as last time? Yesterday you were insisting you were straight and clamming up at a gay bar... today you’re begging me to stay with you, asking me to lay my feelings out like there’s no danger to that? Are you crazy? Why should I do that for you? Why should I bare all for someone who’s so unsure of themselves? I’m not Charlie, Oliver. I’m not a plaything, an experiment, a sponge to soak up your pain. You don’t get to just walk back into my life and ask me to surrender to you after one night together. What exactly are you offering me? What do you _have_ to offer me? You’re still married for christ’s sake.”

I took a deep breath, tried to bring the pitch of my voice down a note or two as I pressed my fingers to the bridge of my nose.

“You have so much to figure out, Oliver," I said, voice more calm now. "You must know that? It breaks my heart to see you such a shell of yourself. I would fix everything for you if it was that easy. You know I would. But you have to figure out your own life before you start inviting others into it.”

I stepped forward, reached up to touch his cheek affectionately. His chin trembled dangerously and if I didn’t know any better I would have thought he was about to cry. “I love you,” I whispered to him, pressing my fingers gently into the soft flesh of his neck. “I always have. But this isn’t how love works. It isn’t just at your disposal to take whenever you need it.”

“I didn’t mean to -- I -- I wasn’t trying to --” Oliver stammered, looking down at his feet as he struggled to find the words, visibly biting back tears. I had never seen him so affected before, so decidedly soft in his emotions. I wanted to wrap my limbs around him and never let go. “I’m just desperately trying to reconcile all of this. You’re the only thing I understand right now.”

“I’m the only thing you _think_ you understand.” I felt my heart rupture right down the middle as I said it. “Go home, Oliver. It’s not me you need to be reconciling with. Talk to your wife. I’m sure you’re not the only one who has sacrificed things for your family. You won’t find any peace until you learn to let go of all of this,” I said, squeezing his bicep. “I know how hard it is for you, but there’s strength in being vulnerable. Trust me.”

And I really wanted him to trust me, if only this once. I tore myself away from him and grabbed my jacket from the bed. When I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, Oliver was there behind me, eyes red-rimmed, pupils blown, mouth pressed together tightly. I leaned forward to give him one last kiss on the lips; gentle and lingering but clipped of it’s warmth to make it clear that this was not an invitation for more. It couldn’t be, and it took every ounce of restraint I had left to give it to him.

“Be an example for your boys, Oliver. See what comes of it.”

And with that final cut of advice, I turned and walked away, not daring to look back even for a second.

 

*******

 

As soon as I hit the street the tears fell. I walked fast, rain drizzling from the sky as I took up a pace that made me breathless and dizzy. It was over an hours walk to my hotel but I couldn’t bear to hail a taxi. I needed fresh air, movement, distraction of some kind. The rain became heavier with each street I vanquished, weighing down my curls, dripping onto my face, soaking through the thick material of my jacket. Halfway there, having found myself in a lonely alleyway as I cut across one of the many piazzas, I collapsed against the wall of a restaurant still with it’s shutters down. Crouching down to drown out my sobs in the palm of my hands, I heaved loudly, trying to catch my breath, my body still toiling with the physical effects of my hangover and everything else I was subjecting it to. For a moment I thought I might throw up again, but after a while I managed to find the strength to stand back up and continue walking, the rest of my journey evaporating in the downpour.

By the time I was back at my hotel I was soaked to the bone and all cried out. I sat down on the edge of my bed feeling empty and cold in more ways than I could count. Peeling off my wet clothes I climbed underneath the fresh unused sheets and reached for the book on the nightstand, opening it up to where I had pressed my father’s letter between the pages to keep it safe. I unfolded the parchment carefully, laying my still damp head on the pillow as I read each line once more, slowly and carefully as if the words were written for me and me alone, the voice I had known better than any other in my life clear as a bell.

 

_É la vita._

_É la vita._

_É la vita._

 

When I was seventeen, Oliver made a choice to walk away from me. A choice that allowed me the freedom to discover myself and find my footing at a time that was integral to my understanding of who I was. I could not say whether his decision was right or wrong - perhaps every decision is both right and wrong - but I do know that his actions were not just to preserve himself, but an intentional act of kindness and selflessness that led me to a life of acceptance and understanding. I knew, thanks to my father’s wise words all those years ago, that it was my turn to return that favour and allow Oliver the space to gift himself that very same freedom.

Exhausted, I fell asleep with the letter pressed to my heart, comforted by the knowledge that I was doing the right thing. Although it pained me, perhaps this was my way of finally giving Oliver that tiny piece of his heart back. And with it, I hoped he could find the strength and courage to live his truth and finally become the man I knew him to be.


	8. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little long for an epilogue maybe, but with all the sentimentality... enjoy.

 

**10 months later**

_Somewhere in Midtown Manhattan_

 

Considering I didn’t even enjoy my own wedding it was hardly surprising that _other_ people’s weddings didn’t score high on the list of places I delighted in spending my Saturday nights. And yet, somehow, there I was, in the grand room of an upscale hotel in New York City, sipping lackadaisical on my third martini of the evening - already seriously considering a fourth. Fellow Cornell alumnus E. B. White once referred to the martini as "the elixir of quietude", and honestly, I couldn’t have agreed more.

I hadn’t been invited to the actual ceremony - thank _God_ \- but I had promised to come along to the reception afterwards. Melissa, the bride, was our department secretary and had been for many years. A true god-send of admin, timetabling and general organisation - things that us academics tend to become fuzzy-headed (and admittedly lazy) about. So when her boyfriend of fifteen years finally asked her to be his wife, the whole department jumped at the invitation to celebrate. My aforementioned dislike of weddings almost caused me to knee-jerk decline, but I caught myself before I did. She had saved my ass more than once with the dean over the last decade, so I figured the least I could do was book myself into my usual Manhattan hotel and show my face for a few hours.

When I agreed to marry Eleanor (because that’s what it was, there was no proposal from my end), I didn’t have any idea of what to expect. I was still so young, and up until that point my only experiences with weddings had been from childhood, where all I cared about was the food and what time we could eventually go home. Any illusion of being in control of my _own_ wedding was soon dismissed by my future - now thankfully-deceased - father-in-law. And since he was footing the bill for the whole excessive affair, I felt little desire to complain. I just sat back and let my blushing bride pick out whatever she wanted for her big day, knowing my only job was to turn up and do as I was told.

The wedding was fairly traditional, just as our parents wanted it. We signed the _Ketubah_ , we exchanged our vows underneath the _Chuppah_ , and I broke the glass underneath the right sole of my brand new Oxfords. I remembered watching my uncle get married when I was around eight-years-old. I watched him stomp on that glass with a juvenile glee, thinking that I couldn’t wait to do the same on my own wedding day - if just because eight-year-old boys tend to enjoy needlessly destroying things. But when it came to be my turn, I was old enough to understand the symbolism. They say that the breaking of the glass represents the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, but for most it simply demonstrates that marriage holds sorrow as well as joy and is a representation of the commitment to stand by one another even in hard times. I took this silent vow very seriously. I was giving myself to Eleanor after all, and wanted her to have everything she had ever hoped for in a marriage and a husband. Because I did love her. I did. But only, it turned out, in the very limited ways I knew how.

Elio did cross my mind on that day - albeit only briefly - when the pianist played a piece by Liszt as the _hors d'oeuvres_ were served. I enjoyed it for a moment or two (perhaps only seconds), letting the notes wash over me in the sunshine they summoned, before urgently pushing him back down into the cage I kept him in - deep, deep in my already fragmented heart. Self-preservation, I told myself then. Cowardice is what I’d call it now.

Slowly, Elio crept back into my mind like a parasite that lay forcibly dormant - suppressed initially by the medication that was my marriage. When I least expected it I’d see him; at the back of my lectures, in line for coffee, crossing the quad or the parking lot or the street by my home. Worst of all, he infiltrated my dreams. These were the hardest to bear, for he was so vivid and real that I scarcely knew they were fantasy until I woke next to the congruous curves of my wife curled away from me, and not the lithe lines of Elio laid out in the morning Italian sunshine, as graceful as the sleeping endymion.

With every major event that bracketed my life the ghost of Elio inside me was temporarily muzzled. He, and all that he had grown to represent, was easier to ignore when I was focused. When Joshua was born I knew Elio was less than 4 hours away from me in New York. It was his first year of college - Samuel had told me so in a letter he had sent to wish me luck in the new school year. And yet his obtainable presence was little disturbance. Children do that to you, you see. They force you to forget everything that isn’t them. They’re needy, all-encompassing, and have little patience for your woe’s or troubles. I had no choice but to step up and be the best husband and father I could be. For Eleanor, who I had sworn myself to in all of our endeavours. And for the boys, who I had brought into this world under the promise that I would put them front and centre of my own.

Before I knew it I was knee deep in a life that was running almost entirely on instinct. There was no space in me for Elio to creep out between the cracks of work and home. And I was okay with that - because it provided me with the dispassion I needed to keep this well-oiled machine of lies moving. And whilst I was contending with diapers and playdates in my selfish-smug state of fictitious benevolence, Elio was - unbeknownst to me - contending with the heartbreaking realities of life and death; on the front line of a war I was only skim-reading about in newspapers.

As the boys grew up (as children tend to do), things supposedly got easier. Once they could take charge of their own schedules, complete their homework without our involvement, and finally be left home for an hour without the need for paid assistance incase world war three broke out, the weight of parenthood began to absolve - and with it, my wife’s expectation for me to be more present reappeared. As the burdens of young parenthood dropped away one-by-one, I was left to bear my soul with all of its wounds again.

The ghost of Elio slid uninvited back into my consciousness, but this time as an abstract, unknown entity that fascinated and tormented me. I wondered where he was, what was he doing, who was he loving. And as my world became more cavernous, more void of meaning, I grew more and more isolated from the wife I had promised better for. We fought over everything, but mostly we fought about me. I was distant, she said. Unreachable. If I wasn’t buried in my work I was drowning in my liquor. And if I wasn’t in either of those states, I was floating through the days like a man marooned on a planet he barely understood.

And then he appeared. Not as a fragment of my psyche or an apparition in a nameless crowd, but a real, physical entity standing separate from my dreams. I barely recognised him. The boy who seldom needed to shave his upper lip more than once a week had grown a beard that disguised his delicate, beautiful face. It was a crime, really. He looked tired, weary even, as if he had been wandering aimlessly ever since the day I left. It was a narcissistic observation, because Elio was not stupid enough to still be hanging onto my ghost the way I was hanging onto his.

Elio’s brief visit shifted something inside me. It gave meaning to that emptiness. Labelled it with something I didn’t want to acknowledge but knew I couldn’t ignore. And when Charlie stepped foot into my office one cold, December afternoon - his dark hair an effigy of Elio’s - there was only one way our relationship could have gone. I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried. I was out of strength, out of resilience, out of excuses either which way. Charlie was a vessel for my catharsis, the embodiment of the shame I had lived with all those years. And as I made love to him behind the sordid shield that had separated Eleanor and I for years, I thought often of Elio and never of her. They all deserved better. Of course they did. But I was a man who loved like a child, only capable of giving my heart in ways that benefited me in the moment. Elio, an escape. Eleanor, a mask. Charlie, a release. When I took a mile, I was guilty of only ever giving back an inch. Which, admittedly, made me no man at all.

After the boys overheard a particularly venomous argument between Eleanor and I, we agreed it was finally time to bite the bullet and separate. I moved into an apartment nearby - alone for the first time in decades - and from there things only got worse. Even my therapist began to grow increasingly impatient with my desolation. And when Alexander picked up my dog-eared copy of Armance from the box of books I had elected to keep in my downsize, I knew I was doomed.

I kept that book by my bed for weeks, running my fingers over the faded pencil marks of Elio’s tender inscription with every chapter; impossibly wise and inexplicably astute. As I lay there, my mind on Armance and Octave, drawing the parallels Elio had already observed, I was reminded of another story from that summer. A story of a knight who didn’t know whether to speak or to die.

 _Speak or die._ That was the fork I had reached in my life after so many years of circling to avoid it. I thought of Octave and his sorrow-induced death and realised I did not want a similar fate for myself. So with all the courage I had left within me, I reached out to Elio, thinking it was to him I needed to speak.

But I was wrong. Because Elio was the one person who already knew my truth. It was the rest of the world I had kept in the dark.

 

*******

 

Melissa’s wedding party was anything but intimate. Well over 200 people had arrived, all loaded easily into the faux-french ballroom of the faux-french hotel. The decor was glitzy but thankfully tasteful. Sparkling chandeliers hung above us from regal ceiling tiles, tables overflowed with twinkling candles, and waterfalls of pastel-coloured flowers I couldn’t name even if I tried cascaded from whatever surfaces were available. A string quartet sat atop the parquet dance floor, dangerously close to the five-tier wedding cake behind them, providing the backing track as guests helped themselves to the canapés floating around on squares of slate. Just like mine (though we did not have that many people to invite), it was a whole affair.

My colleagues were, predictably, talking only about work. And if I wasn’t bored enough already they were providing me with all the dreary conversation I could hope for to make my evening just the perfect level of dull. I was thankful for my elixir of quietude, because as they began discussing the upcoming school year with an intricacy only chronically boring people could manage, I was all but ready to smash my face through the nearest window.

When an expressionless man in a tux offered me some kind of smoked salmon vol-au-vent I accepted it heartily, scarfing it down in one quick mouthful.

“Oliver, would you like another drink?” Michael asked from across the table.

“No, I’m good thank you. Still working on this one,” I smiled, gesturing to my martini. It was almost finished, but I wanted a reason to go to the bar myself fairly soon, if just to excuse myself for a while. He shrugged his indifference and I watched as he ambled towards the bar.

I sighed as quietly as I could manage, resting my chin in the palm of my hand as I idly pushed the olive around the bottom of my drink.

It was then that I saw him.

Stood precisely in the passage of my gaze as if I had conjured him there myself, was Elio.

_My Elio._

Dressed in a deep teal crushed velvet jacket with matching bow tie, he was utterly unmissable. He wasn’t trying to blend in, that was for sure. And _goddamnit,_ I would know those curls anywhere. Those perfectly angled cheekbones sculpted by some higher being. Those roseate lips perpetually on the brink of a smile, as if he had never set eyes on anything unworthy in his life. His expression was soft and sweet as he listened to his companion speak, dovelike and dazzling, even in a room such as this with all the crystal in the world to contend with.

The air disappeared from my lungs like a punctured tyre, the sudden change in pressure silencing everything around me to mere muffles.

And then he laughed. The laugh that always seemed to transcend loveliness. The laugh that I had bottled and kept with me for decades and didn’t hear nearly enough of in Rome thanks to my own self-indulgence. It floated towards me like a waft of pollen I was biologically designed to seek out. And though it was barely audible through the music and conversation filling the room, my ears were still perilously tuned to the sound of his voice.

I abandoned my half-empty martini and the gripping conversation of my table without a second thought, walking the ocean of distance between us before my mind or my colleagues had chance to take stock of what I was doing. I didn’t even check in with my manners before I tapped him on the shoulder from behind, his name tumbling from my lips like a declaration.

 _Elio._ It was heavy on my tongue; bittersweet and moreish.

He spun on his heel immediately - elegant and sure of himself even when caught off guard. It took a couple of seconds before his brain registered exactly who had called upon him mid-conversation. But when it did, I swear I saw myself reflected in every corner of his face.

“Oliver? Oh my god!” He smiled wide, those creased dimples around his mouth materialising from nowhere as he wrapped his arms around me in a crushing hug. “Why are you -- how are -- what are you doing here?” he stammered as he took a step back to take all of me in.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I chuckled, still dizzy from the precipitousness of the moment.

“I -- I’m a friend of Jack’s. We went to NYU together.”

“I work with Melissa,” I explained. “Got the classics department over there causing a ruckus,” I joked, gesturing behind me.

“Wow. It’s small world.”

“Sure is,” I agreed.

Twenty years of life and not once did Elio and I accidentally cross paths, not even when geographically close-by or both doing the rounds of high academic (and often trans-atlantic) drudgery. And yet there we were, crossing paths by pure chance, less than a year since our turbulent weekend in Rome that had led to me completely dismantling my life piece-by-piece.

Noticing that the woman beside him was eyeing me up suspiciously, Elio caught her gaze and quickly apologised.

“Oh, sorry. Anaya, this is Oliver. Oliver, Anaya.”

I was about to lean in to kiss Anaya on the cheek in polite greeting, but instead she reached forward and shook my hand firmly. I was taken aback but welcomed it courteously.

“Pleasure to meet you, Oliver. How do you know our Elio?”

 _Our Elio_.

Of course. A blunt reminder that he was only mine for a very, very short time. Barely at all. Perhaps _not at all_ , actually, when I thought about it. I had never met with Elio in a social setting of his own outside of our weeks together. To see him now was like seeing an animal in the wild you had only ever seen in captivity. It reminded me a little of whenever I caught my son’s unaware with their friends - ostensibly they were the same, but in some metaphysical way they were different; seemingly fitting into their skin far better when not being constantly observed.

 _Their Elio_ paused, looking at me with a silent passing of the baton, gifting me control of answering the question whatever way I felt comfortable. Ever the gentleman, I thought. I felt a surge of confidence, spurred on by Anaya’s blind bullseye right into my weak spot, but it fell short of complete honesty.

“We spent a summer together. When we were younger.” It was a weak description.

“Oh?” Anaya’s harsh features softened just a touch, as if the phrase _spent a summer together_ actually meant something to her. She looked at Elio, who was still looking at me, his eyes glowing greener than I’d ever seen them. Perhaps it was the jacket.

“Yeah, much younger. Before I knew you guys,” he nodded, blinking out of his momentary daze. He sounded terribly American.

“ _Very_ young then.” Anaya huffed a laugh, and I was forced into a smirk, rocking back on my heels slightly as I bathed in the smugness that I knew him first. But of course I did. He was a teenager for christ’s sake.

Elio quickly asked Anaya if she would excuse us for a moment, then reached out to wrap his slender fingers around my forearm in a touch that made my knees feel weaker than they were. “Shall we go outside?”

“Sure,” I nodded, and let him lead the way.

It was unseasonably warm for September, the air outside heavy with the smell of cooling asphalt. I associated it only with New York in the summer, when the scorching sun disappeared and the air relieved the blistered streets of their duty. We stepped out into the courtyard, Manhattan’s infinite melody of sounds creeping in over the walls and mixing with the music from inside. Small crowds of people were gathered on the patio that was lit up by strings of scintillating LED bulbs. Elio led us over to the far corner where there was a small table and a semblance of privacy.

He paused before taking a seat, turning his gaze upwards.

“The thing I always hated about New York was that you can never see the stars,” he mused, staring up at the sky, which, just as he predicted, was absent of any glittering specks thanks to the light pollution of the city. “In B. we could always see the stars. Dad and I used to point out the constellations to each other. Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Ophiuchus… the one that looks like a frying pan.”

I laughed, nodding. I knew the one. “I don’t think that’s a constellation actually. Just part of one.”

“Oh? Didn’t have you down as an astronomy fan.”

“Well, I tried to figure out astrology first, but I’m a Gemini. Far too unfocused.”

The quip made Elio giggle and I smiled in response. I took a seat on one of the wooden chairs, fishing out the cigarettes from my inside pocket before quickly changing my mind. For some reason I didn’t want to spend this moment with Elio puffing on a stick of nicotine as a distraction. Elio followed suit, sitting down next to me with a lazy smile hanging from his features. He didn’t reach for a cigarette either, but his cheeks and the tip of his nose were already tickled pink, the way they always were whenever he was drinking wine. He shrugged off his jacket, the beautiful and no doubt expensive material almost variegating in the moonlight.

“So,” he started, sipping the drink he had brought out with him. “How have you been? You look well.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, my smile loose and unforced. “I uh -- Things are good actually. Josh is doing great at school. He got accepted onto the program in Rome. He heads out at the end of September.”

“Yeah?” Elio’s delight was genuine. Everything about him was always genuine and it never ceased to amaze me how constantly pure he could remain even after the world had done countless injustices upon him. “That’s amazing. He must be so excited.”

“He is. We’re very proud of him. And Alex is slowly coming round to the idea of college. So, maybe that’ll happen. If not we’ll just see. Plenty of options out there.”

“There sure is,” Elio nodded. “And what about _you_ , Oliver? How have _you_ been?”

“Me?” I chuckled, running a hand through my hair. I never enjoyed talking about myself, but Elio always found a way to carefully unpin my hesitancies and give me a safe space to be honest. “I’ve been good, you know? I took your advice. I spoke to Eleanor… told her everything. We’ve been divorced for a few months now. I think we both feel free from those chains now that it’s all officially over. We still have some way to go, It’s not been easy. But things are definitely improving and that’s only a good thing.”

I looked at him. His eyes were shining, reflecting the lambent light coming in through the windows from the ballroom, the colours dancing effortlessly on the contours of his face. If you asked me to paint a picture of the loveliest thing I had ever seen, that might have been it. But then a memory washed over me, cold and laced with remorse, reminding me that I had not earned the right to appreciate him so intently. I pulled my gaze away from him in haste, as if a second longer might cause either one of us to catch fire.

“You were right to walk away from me in Rome, Elio.” My tone turned sombre. “What I did was selfish. It took a while for me to realise it but… I’m sorry. For all of it.”

“No need to be sorry,” he said simply, idly twisting the stem of his glass. Would I ever not be amazed by his grace?

“There’s every need to be sorry. I cut you open just so you could bleed with me. It wasn’t fair.”

“Maybe not. But we do these things to heal. I never thought for a second that you were purposely trying to hurt me.”

“I wasn’t, but I did. I wanted to chase you all the way back to B. after you left, but... I knew you were right. I had a whole world to fix. I don’t think you’ll ever understand how much I needed what you gave me. The courage to come home and make sense of this life I had all but given up on.”

“I didn’t give you that courage, Oliver. You gave it to yourself. I just… gave you a nudge.”

“Well, it was a big nudge. More of a kick really,” I smiled wide and we both laughed.

A silence settled between us; beautiful and still. His tongue swiped innocently over his bottom lip and I was suddenly brought back to our final night in Rome. Our _second_ final night in Rome. When he had given himself to me in so many ways and then somehow gifted me the strength to see past my desires and into what my heart truly needed.

“I came out after Christmas,” I said suddenly

His eyes shot up to meet mine. “You did?”

He seemed surprised and not surprised all at once, and the curious arch of his eyebrow was so much like his father the likeness might have alarmed me if it wasn’t so comforting.

“Yeah. It felt only right after being honest with Eleanor to then be honest with the boys. They were a little shocked at first, but they’re kids of the new millennium, they were more concerned with when my new place would have wifi.” We shared a smile. “I told my parents too. I probably didn’t need to. I haven’t seen them in four years. But it felt like an important step to give me some closure.”

Elio nodded. “I’m proud of you, Oliver. Maybe that’s a corny thing to say right now, but I am.”

His words made my heart float up into my throat and I had to quickly divert the conversation away from me before I said or did something that would fracture my composure. I may have found ways to be more vulnerable, more open, but I still lived with the instinct to guard my most private emotions. That probably would never be completely exorcised from my psyche - no matter how much armour I shed.

“Are you here just for the wedding?” I asked.

“No, I’m over with Marzia and the girls. A little vacation. We fly home on Friday.”

I was about to ask him about Marzia, and about Luisa and Elia who I presumed were on their first trip to the States. But from the doorway behind us an anonymous face appeared. They were about to start the first dance it informed us, and the talkative crowds of smokers bristled with excitement as they began to make their way back inside.

“I suppose we should be polite…” I said, reluctant to cut short our private recess.

“I suppose so,” Elio agreed, rising to his feet and grabbing his jacket. He smiled at me as he fixed the button across his chest. “You look wonderful tonight, professor,” he told me.

And I was stunned for a second that he could say such a thing when he looked like _that._

“Well. You don’t look half bad yourself, _tesoro_ ,” I said, my words painfully heartfelt as I reached out to run my fingers over the velvet covering his arms. It was beautiful, like the inside of a quartz geode. Exactly as I expected him to look if I were to peer inside his soul.

He stepped forward into my space, giving me no other option but to embrace him. I did so with ease and unabashed pleasure, wrapping him in my arms like it was the first time I had ever done so. I could have easily stayed like that forever with his body against mine, our heartbeats finding each others rhythms and settling together in time. I knew I had made no compelling case to be granted such a wish, so I let go, my body suddenly feeling less whole than it did moments before.

“Better get going before Anaya kills me for abandoning her again,” Elio smiled, not quite daring to meet my gaze.

I nodded my agreement and watched as he crossed the small courtyard before me, my feet apparently soldered to the spot.

“Elio?” I called out just as he was about to step inside. I waited until he was facing me again. “What if I took you for dinner? Wednesday or something.”

I threw it out like a fishing net, loose and hopeful. Perhaps, If I was the luckiest man on the planet, I’d catch the corner of a second chance I know I didn’t deserve.

His wine-wet lips twisted into a smirk with the breezy nonchalance of that precocious seventeen-year-old I fell in love with twenty-one summers ago. I watched with stolen breath as his eyes grazed slowly up the length of my body, the intentional stalling an attestation that even I wasn’t too stupid to translate. And when his gaze eventually did reach mine, I was met with the most admissible of looks; open and forgiving. Unapologetically Elio.

The sight took my breath away; his eyes glazed over into a total reflection of the dull night sky above us. Only in his, tucked away behind the long lashes that protected his inestimable soul, there were stars everywhere. Twinkling like a constellation of his own making; endless, infinite, impossible.

“What if you did?” Elio replied, that playful smirk still lingering.

And with a tantalising flick of his curls, he was gone.

 

*******

 

On Wednesday, in the window seat of Elio’s favourite _pizzeria_ on the corner of 43rd and 9th, the extended prologue of our lives would end. And with it would come the first chapter of a future hard to predict, but a future I had no plans of excluding him from.

Whether Elio would be mine again remained to be seen. I had no right to ask anything of him, least of all his heart. But I was no longer a man declaring to know himself. I was a man declaring the truth - that I knew _absolutely nothing_. Nothing except for the fact that I would not let fear and shame rule my life for a second longer.

But if there was one thing I did know, it was that I was the best version of myself in Elio’s company. And I was prepared to fight for him how I should have fought for him all those years ago. His barriers were gone. My barriers were gone. I would not let oceans or years or doubt stand between us now - even if I had to spend every waking breath promising to be better; promising to become every inch the the person he believed me to be.

Because if I lived to be an old man - which I was surely hoping to - I was only halfway through this life. And I would gladly, abundantly, unreservedly gift the second half of it to him in its entirety.

Because it was his. It had _always_ been his.

And if none of that worked? If after everything Elio could not bear to hand his heart back to me? I would understand. And I would just have to love him the way the rest of the world are condemned to.

From a distance, in awe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I guess this is the end guys! This is not the strongest chapter at all (in fact, I might actively hate it but hey, I am NOT good at endings), but it's really just an indulgence. I hope it at least satisfies whatever needs you were still nursing from the last chapter!
> 
> I cannot tell you how grateful I am to all of you who took the time to read this silly little story of mine, give kudos and comment. Truly, it has been wonderful to hear your feedback and speak to you all in the comments. This story has kind of taken over my life a little, so I am glad to release it and see it all tied up. But you all have no idea how wonderful it's been to have such a kind, heartfelt response to this story that I started writing just for a bit of fun. Thank you a MILLION times over to every single one of you.
> 
>  
> 
> As for going forward, there MAY be a sequel. I cannot promise when, but there are two ideas floating around. Perhaps you'd like to give your preference in the comments?
> 
> Option one: A direct sequel following Elio and Oliver as they spend a summer at the villa in the company of Oliver's 17-year-old son Alex. Likely fun and fluff and maybe a bit of smut?
> 
> Option two: Not so much a sequel as a spinoff, going back to Elio's college years in New York, with all his arty friends (the ones who gave him the nickname Little Mozart!) and Sébastien. Of course this couldn't be completely canon to È la vita as I would bring Oliver into the mix. It would probably involve a lot of smut and angst.
> 
>  
> 
> Let me know your thoughts! Peace & love <3


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